Frayed

By Tom Piccirilli

Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

Copyright 2011

Copy-Edited by Neal Hock – Cover Design by David Dodd

LICENSE NOTES:

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OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY

TOM PICCIRILLI:

NOVELS:

Short Ride to Nowhere

Nightjack

NOVELLAS:

Al You Despise

Fuckin' Lie Down Already

Loss

The Fever Kil

The Nobody

The Last Deep Breath

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson 1

THE REASON FOR MURDER,

STONE THOUGHTS

THROWING SPARKS

Gray invited me up to the insane asylum hootenanny.

He said there’d be lots of pretty girls, rich food, and non-alcoholic beer. I’d been struggling with the middle of my novel before he went in the bin, and he figured correctly I’d stil be stuck dead in pretty much the same place now, six months later. “It’l do you good,”

he told me over the phone, sounding happier than I’d heard him in years.

I drove the hour north up the Thruway to the Clinic, expecting to see electrified fences topped with razor wire and gun-toting security guards al over the grounds. Or at the very least lots of burly orderlies in white, carrying truncheons, cans of mace. Grinning and waiting to catch some psychotic climbing down knotted sheets. But the skinny guy reading a supermarket tabloid in the booth at the gate just lifted the semaphore arm and waved me in. No second glance, no crow’s feet at his eyes.

At the front desk of the main building I gave my name. A tiny Asian nurse with reams of black hair spil ing from beneath her little hat told me that Gray was located in dwel ing #4. She handed me a detailed map and made a red X where I was to go.

She smiled vacantly at me as if I was a lunatic, and I had the faint impression that the red X might be a booby trap, a pit laid out with sharpened bamboo stakes. It felt very easy to lose control of yourself in a mental hospital because you wouldn’t have very far to travel to find a bed.

I walked over to Gray’s cottage. It real y was a tiny cottage, one of four spaced directly in front of the Olympic-sized pool where several girls were swimming and laughing. They waved at me and I waved back.

The door was open and I stepped in. The place had a Hawaiian motif going, very much like a cabana. He had a large bar with five wooden stools, and there were coconuts, a mini-surfboard, and netting hanging in the corners of the room. The nets were ful of papier mâché lobsters with bright blue eyes and broad, smiling faces.

A large L-shaped sofa took up much of the room.

Off to one side was an extremely clean kitchenette with a breakfast nook that had a freshly cut rose in a crystal vase sitting on the table. This is the home where you live every night in your dreams, where you are beloved and admired and respected for your talents, and they bow when they bring you the fruity drinks. The bedroom door hung ajar and I spotted the edge of a double bed overflowing with an absurd amount of extravagant pil ows.

Al in al , the cabana was about three times the size of my apartment in the city.

This is why men climb towers with high-powered rifles. This is why they go to war and learn to hack off ears. Because of this we beat our wives. Brutalize our children. Light ourselves on fire. Simply, smal jealousies climb into the back of our skul s, one slimy trail after the other, until they’re so densely packed that your thoughts are like sparks thrown from a flint striking stone.

Gray sat on the couch facing away from me, typing on his laptop and absorbed by the process, an unsharpened pencil wedged between his even, white teeth. I stared over his shoulder and read the first two paragraphs of the story he was working on. The work was solid, poetic, and distinctive; everything my own writing wasn’t anymore.

He’d lost weight and had a deep, rich tan, as if he’d been digging ditches or graves. Maybe boxing in the outdoor rings the way he had in col ege. He’d dyed the gray out of his beard, had a sharp stylish haircut, and wore slick, new clothes that fit him wel .

So it wasn’t bedlam. No serpent pits, iron bars, or straightjackets. No rubber rooms or medieval torture devices designed to drive evil spirits from the lunatics. A loud splash outside was fol owed by the flutter of provocative giggles.

“How do I get into this place?” I asked.

He turned, looked up, and spit the pencil out. “Just try to kil someone who’s done you wrong,” he told me.

“And be so conflicted about it that you make at least one fairly dramatic suicide attempt.”

“I can probably do that,” I said.

“I know you can.”

It felt like he wanted to get into a serious talk right now, from the first minute, and start hashing out a few of our many unresolved issues, which probably wouldn’t be the best thing to do. I steeled myself in case he came at me—perhaps even wanting him to, wil ing him to—but he sat back, checked his screen, and corrected a typo. Since there were no doctors or attendants around keeping watch I had to be the one to act the most casual and anchored, which wasn’t a good role for me.

“You look great,” I told him. “How do you feel?”

He had to think about it for a while. “Clear-headed,”

he final y admitted. “For the first time in a very long while. Some of the static seems to have faded, you know?”

I stared out the window. A couple of gorgeous women went by in bikinis, holding froo-froo drinks and magazines. They looked over and caught me watching. They waved again, and I waved back again.

“You sure this is real y a mental hospital?”

“More like a preserve. You get to see the wildlife in its natural habitat.”

“A cabana is your natural habitat?”

“In the best of al possible worlds I suppose it would be.”

He let out a laugh that wasn’t a laugh. It was a sound I was familiar with, and there was a tinge of sorrow and hate in it. He was trying to tel me, or himself, something that he couldn’t say aloud, so it just circled inside his chest for a time, hunting for a way to get out.

“So this is it? The best world for you?”

“Better than Manhattan.”

“Wel , yeah.”

“You stil watering my plants?” he asked, genuinely interested.

“You only have one plant and it’s a cactus. It’s pretty low-maintenance.”

“Unlike the rest of us.”

He said it with that strained chuckle once more. He missed his digs. The harsh action of the street, the museums and bookstores, the overbearing weight of history, art, and literature laid across his shoulders, reminding him he was alive. His three ex-wives. The whores he met in the al eys, and the sweethearts he took to the theater. You could become addicted to dichotomy. The nuns and priests who guided his worship. Maybe even me. Al the things that had sent him over the big edge in the first place.

I knew better than to ask him about his work. We often clashed on the approach and execution of the writing, the development of style, the procedure of publication. It had been our dream as kids, our passion as teenagers, and our downfal as adults.

But it would be a good way to gauge how the Clinic might be helping Gray to get past his trouble areas, many of which I shared with him. I stepped over to his coffee table and glanced again at the laptop. I saw him jerk as the muscles in his back tightened, but at least he didn’t tackle me. That was progress so far as I was concerned.

He struck the chord first and asked, “So why are you snagged in the latest book?”

“I’m not certain,” I said, surprised at how effortlessly I’d answered. What you hold back the most becomes the easiest to part with. “My concentration isn’t worth shit nowadays. I can knock out short stories and I’ve been busy with freelance non-fiction crap, but whenever I try to duck my chin and go in for the long haul, something bounces me out again. It’s getting on my nerves, to be honest. I’m pacing the apartment at al hours. My neighbors are starting to put in complaints to the building manager.”

“You need to spend more time outside, in the park.

People watch, take some notes. The fresh air wil do you good. It might help if you bought yourself a laptop.

You’re never without a chance to produce.”

“I can’t compose directly onto those things,” I told him. “I can transcribe my handwritten notes, but that’s it.”

“Don’t be so resolute. Give it a try.”

The idea of Gray giving me advice, consoling me about my work, made me jerk as the muscles tightened in my back. Man, it took no time at al for the two of us to get under each other’s skins. Sometimes it felt good to have that kind of power in your life, and sometimes you had to ponder why you cared. He put a hand on my shoulder and I looked around at the shining bar top and the little happy lobster faces, wondering if there was any chance I could get a margarita. I sat in one of the stools and thought about how much it was like the smal restaurants where our fathers used to drink wine together.

Gray smiled, showing off those perfect teeth again.

He’d had some dental work done here too. Jesus, no wonder my taxes were so high. Who the fuck was footing the bil for his vacation?

“How about you?” I asked. “You seem to be back on your stride. What’re you working on?”

He’d been thinking about his response since before I’d walked in the door. It rol ed off his lips like he’d been practicing his dialogue in front of a mirror.

Which he used to do. Which we both used to do. “A supernatural suspense about two brothers who find out they’re the sons of a fal en archangel. One fol ows his father’s wil to try to destroy the world and the other refuses. They both end up in Jerusalem gathering various biblical artifacts as Armageddon approaches.

Monty has the first three chapters and there’s interest from three editors. He’s trying to drive them into a bidding war.”

Monty Stobbs was Gray’s agent, a shark in the chum-fil ed waters of publishing. He’d made Gray a major hit out of the gate ten years ago, and since then Gray had completed five cinder block-sized novels, and not one was worth a damn. Monty had mishandled my career for a time, and even though I’d made some good cash up front, Monty’s deals had screwed me over in my royalties and reprint rights.

Gray’s book actual y sounded intriguing and marketable, and from what I’d read of it just now I knew it had some narrative muscle to it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the publishing world would only be attracted to his book because they could push it as a novel written in a mental hospital. They wouldn’t know Gray had cottage #4. They’d play up the electroshock angle, make it seem like he wrote the whole thing with a crayon stuck between his teeth while he was tied down to a bed. Frontal lobe surgery, the sexual y heinous acts of deviant attendants. How could it not rocket to #1 on the New York Times bestsel er list?

“I’m glad for you,” I told him. “You deserve to have them perk up and take notice.”

“You’re ful of shit, but thanks for trying.” It was such a left-handed comment that I actual y shook my head as if he’d tagged me with a jab. “I appreciate you making the effort to pretend to care about my career.”

He said it with a tight grin of authority, as if he’d seen through me and found me utterly lacking.

Now that got me pissed, and the familiar heat rushed up into my chest and into my throat. The way he always implied I could never real y be happy for him. “I meant it.”

“Okay.”

“Not only okay...I meant what I said.”

“You’re just repeating yourself now.”

“Because I want you to believe me.”

“Is that what you want, Eddie?”

“Yes.” I held in the thrashing animal. We al had to hold in the thrashing animal, I knew, though I’d forgotten exactly why. Some stupid prick had once thought it was better that way. “Is there some reason why you can’t simply accept my good wil towards you?”

“Good wil ?” Gray’s smile was little more than a leer. “I see. So that’s what you cal it?”

“What the hel are you going on about now?”

“You figure it out.”

“Listen to me, you—!”

A shadow crossed before me. A short, elfin blonde about twenty-five years old with eager eyes and a cautious smile stood in the entrance to the cottage.

Her presence snapped me back into myself and I stepped away from Gray, kind of humbled before her.

She was pretty in the way that we both liked, blonde with freckles, with an innocence in her manner, especial y the slightly shy way she didn’t meet anyone’s gaze dead-on.

My imagination burned like kindling. Showing me images of her and me on a front porch of an old Victorian homestead, drinking lemonade in the summer twilight, waving to neighbors while the kids played inside. It was a stupid, romanticized notion of a life that never was and never could be, but it kept me from giving in whenever the unbearable darkness hit.

She had a girl-next-door smile even though I lived next door to a bodega on the Upper West Side.

She said, “Excuse me, Mr. Gray. Wil you be coming over to Ward C for the assembly?”

“Yes, Trudy.”

“That’s wonderful. I made apple fritters, brownies, oatmeal raisin cookies, and devil’s food cake. I’m not sure what I should bring. Do you have any preference?”

“No, but I think my friend might.”

I tried not to take it as a dig that I’d gained weight while he’d trimmed up. I took a step forward and she did a little dodge, adeptly moving aside. “I’ve always had a penchant for oatmeal raisin cookies myself,” I said.

She smiled bashful y and sort of toed the carpet, then spun and rushed outside again.

Gray pursed his lips and said, “You can crash on the couch, if you like.”

“Thanks, maybe I wil .”

“Or if it makes you uncomfortable being here, there’s a motel right outside the Clinic grounds where the families of patients occasional y stay. The town’s cal ed Griffinsvil e. Three stop lights and lots of antique shops for the tourists. Lots of farming back roads. Abundant in smal lakes and ponds. It might be the kind of vacation you need. A chance to go fishing.”

I glanced through the window again as another lovely young woman in a string bikini walked by. I let out a sigh. I was a very good sigher. I’d had a lot of practice.

The girl Trudy bounded back in. She had the brownies and said, “Let’s go, the dance wil be starting soon.”

I fol owed them out past the folks playing vol eybal in the pool, my mouth watering for everything and nothing.

2

HUNGERING,

(THE REMEMBRANCE OF MEDICATION)

AND THE FIRST ADMISSION OF BURIAL

We walked across the clean, wel -kept lawns over to the main structure of the Clinic, which had several smal er buildings attached by glass atriums. There was a lot of activity going on. Groups of people walking by deep in the midst of excited conversation.

It reminded me more of a student center on a col ege campus than a hospital for mental and emotional wel -

being.

If these were the depressed and the suicidal, the hysterical and hal ucinatory, the paranoid and the bipolar, then these psychiatrists were either very good at curing the il or the medication was miraculously effective.

Trudy walked beside Gray as if she were his personal bodyguard. A jittery woman-child doing her best to be both dutiful y maternal and also impress him with her skil s as a spouse. Each of his three marriages had ended in a disaster of kitchen knives and police sirens. I thought the brownies were a good start to the relationship, but might not hold up in the long run.

We entered a huge lobby covered with amateurish art on every free inch of wal space. I found the disparate imagery, visions, and motifs to be a little unsettling. Especial y since they were al bordered by the same nondescript style of black metal frame. The unconfined memories, fantasies, and delusions al given a single composition by the structure of the framework. It was like seeing your nightmares stuck in identical bottles and placed into nondescript rows.

“You don’t like it, do you?” Trudy asked me.

“No.”

“Why?”

I decided to be blunt. For al I knew I was staring at her vented anxieties up on the wal , sequestered and conformed to fit an effigy of desperation. “It’s as if somebody is trying to hammer al these different nervous wrecks into one overal identity.”

Gray turned and stared at me. “Maybe that’s exactly what they are doing.”

I said, “Stick to the pool with the hot chicks and don’t ever visit the crafts shop.”

A elderly nurse spotted Gray the moment we turned down another corridor. Her hat sat primly on her blue rinse hairdo, and she had immense glasses hanging on a chain wound too tightly around her neck. The lenses magnified the ashen, loose skin of her throat making it appear unreal, dead. Her orthopedic sneakers squee-squonked as she moved in on us like a missile. She stopped short and held a smal paper cup containing two damn-near microscopic green pil s.

“Here you are, Mr. Gray, we mustn’t forget our medication.”

“No,” Gray said, “we certainly mustn’t.”

“And please remember not to over-exert yourself at the dance this evening. You too, Trudy.”

“Yes, Miss Bradley.” With that same sheepish expression, Trudy sort of curtsied. She proffered the plate. “Would you like a brownie?”

“No, dear, no, not good for my regularity.”

Gray gave the old woman a smoky glance. “I’l make sure we’re both careful, Nurse Bradley, thank you.” He shot the tiny tablets down without any water and handed the empty cup back to her. She seemed ecstatic that he’d acquiesced so quickly and hadn’t given her any trouble. She gave me a patronizing smile and happily sped off, squee-squonking al the way back down the hal .

“What are they?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He put a hand to his chest as if he could already feel the meds working away in there.

“They told me the first day I was here, but I was so keyed up and disassociated I couldn’t real y hear anybody. Some kind of tranquilizers. They help me accept my present situation.”

“Al I’ve had today is a whitefish sandwich and a box of fruit punch and I think I could accept this situation.”

“That’s because it’s not yours. You can leave whenever you like.”

“Who the hel would want to?”

“You would.”

He said it with great conviction, but I wasn’t so sure.

His writing was going wel , there were ladies in thongs sauntering around, and people were feeding him cake and cookies. It was like some very adolescent version of paradise. A concept I could easily embrace, emotional y stunted as I often felt.

We took an elevator up to the third floor. Brief as the ride was, there was Muzak accompanying us the ful fifteen seconds. The doors opened into a large communal living area where the hootenanny was in ful swing. There were party hats, blowers, bal oons, and catered foods up against the far wal , folks laughing and dancing, embracing one another. The sheer volume and surge of cheerful energy made me a little depressed.

“By the way, what’s the party for?” I asked.

“It’s just a gathering. They do them from time to time.”

On cue, Trudy took him by the hand and led him into the middle of the room, where they clung close to each other, swooning to the music, doing a lot of chatting. I thought it was a pretty bold move on her part, considering how shy she appeared to be. Only the occasional limb flailed or gyrated between the two of them. Gray had never learned to dance.

I stood there, the only wal flower surrounded by sixty or so people conversing, laughing, and enjoying themselves. They knew each other wel , and I guessed they were al part of the group therapy clique.

Either on the same ward or somehow clustered together as a single unit. You don’t know what it feels like to be an outcast until you’re ignored at an insane asylum hootenanny.

I real y hadn’t eaten anything except a whitefish sandwich and a box of fruit juice for breakfast, almost nine hours ago, so I appreciated the chance to chow down on the pastries, Kaiser rol s, curried shrimp salad, and chicken Parmesan mini-heroes. There were stil no doctors in sight, and no one else I could distinguish as a visiting friend or family member.

It wasn’t until I’d eaten half my plate that I wondered how many of these folks might be homicidal like Gray.

Poisoners. The kind of people who mixed ground-up glass in their food. Who tossed in drugs or diseased body fluids.

But I was hungry.

Again the sense that the Clinic was actual y some community col ege affirmed itself. The non-alcoholic beer reminded me of the first time I’d tried to go dry. I spent a month swil ing this kind of shit, and as soon as I’d split with Emily, I was back to binging. At least I wasn’t a nasty drunk. I’d suck down as much liquor as I could in half an hour, and spend the rest of the night passed out in a corner. I was doing everybody a favor.

My few friends general y appreciated it enough to make sure I got home al right.

Gray and Trudy were so deep in conversation that I started to have misgivings. I’d been curious about what he might be tel ing the doctors in this place, but now I started to get nosy about what he admitted even to his fel ow patients. About me. About our work.

About how he wound up in here, a borderline psychotic with dried blood under his fingernails.

I turned around, took a bite out of the chicken Parmesan, and watched the crowd for a minute.

Someone on the other side of the room was staring at me and our gazes flicked against each other so hard that it brought my chin up. She did a slow walk across the length of the room and kept her eyes so steadily on me that I let out a groan. I real y wanted to finish my mini-sub. I tore off two more bites and swal owed them down as fast as I could while she sinuously moved through the oblivious dancers and sidled towards me.

She barely tipped 5’1” but had the compact frame of a gymnast, and she exuded strength and an assertive bearing. Short black hair framed a heart-shaped face, with the olive hue of someone with Mediterranean blood. The same as me.

I couldn’t help wondering what she was doing here in the ward, what problems she might have, what needs weren’t met, which men holding razors lived under her bed. What had she suffered at the hands of a loved one? What closets held her childhood secrets?

I had plenty of troubles, and one of the worst was an intense desire to save beautiful women from the world. I was compel ed to take on quests I could only fail at.

She brought her own atmosphere with her, one separate from the rest of the throng. It clung to her in a luscious cloud and thickened around me as she stepped up.

I had my own weaknesses. Some of them I could put a name to but there were many that I couldn’t. I wondered which one this was going to be in the end.

“Hi, are you new here?”she asked.

“I’m a guest.”

“We’re al guests. They don’t say patient here.

We’re guests.”

“I’m a guest of a guest then.”

“What?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m new.”

She squinted at me like she’d seen me on a street corner somewhere, real y attempting to take stock of me. She got up close, doing a slow once-over of my features, taking in every angle and plane, every scar and hair. It was off-putting, but it gave me a chance to see her own beautiful face in close-up. I felt another barely containable urge to let out a sigh.

“Oh, you’re not new here. You’re Gray’s friend, aren’t you? The other writer?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“He told us last week in group that you were coming.”

That stopped me. The back of neck felt suddenly cool, as if a lover had eased her lips against me there. He’d only asked me to visit this morning. At least we were both sure of ourselves, in our knowledge of one another.

“I’m Eddie Cane.”

“Cheyenne Califa.” She took my hand and squeezed it with a strength that was part disdain and part passion, an ambivalent fusion I could see in her gold-flecked, intensely dark eyes. I watched her wavering between the two forces trapped inside her.

She stood her ground for another instant and then she flowed away with whatever current was trying to draw her off. Her eyes clouded.

“Are you the one who helped him kil the angel?”

I couldn’t have reacted worse if she’d stabbed me in the bel y with a steak knife. I recoiled into the table behind me and knocked about a dozen drinks to the floor. The noise was very loud to me but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

A violent flush heated up my throat. This is why we are so sensitive—we move from ice to fire in the span of a few words. Cheyenne took my hand and pul ed me forward where she buttressed me with her own body. It took another second to realize my knees were quivering and I would’ve fal en if she wasn’t there to hold me up.

So much for keeping secrets.

So much for repressing the dark memories that make you what you are. That give the final borders of definition to your pain and craft.

“He kil ed it,” I told her. “I only helped him to bury it.”

3

WHAT YOU FIND ON THE GROUND

TO PUT IN YOUR MOUTH,

NEW TEETH LAUNCHING FORWARD

Gray and Trudy finished dancing and parted. She looked over his shoulder as he approached but didn’t move to fol ow him. He had the corner of his mouth cocked, but when he saw Cheyenne with me a flash of anger crossed his face. He knew that I knew he’d been tel ing our tale. It made me even more curious about what else he’d revealed in here, what truths and lies he was spil ing to his new unbalanced covenant.

Cheyenne froze in my arms until we’d switched roles, and I was propping her up. She trembled and I could see she understood the kind of fury that lived inside Gray. The chaos that swel ed so close to the surface of his agreeable disposition. He hadn’t fooled everyone.

Maybe it was a touch too dramatic, but I found myself actual y inching out in front of her, as if to shield her. Why the hel not, you do this sort of thing when the moment strikes you as right. We have so few chances to even be pretend heroes. Everybody had to take what he could get.

He said, “Hel o, Cheyenne.”

“Hi,” she murmured.

“I see you’ve met my friend Eddie.”

“Yes.”

“The two of you seem to be getting along quite wel .”

“He’s nice.”

“Yes, he is. What have you been talking about?”

Like this, with no effort at al , Gray had the ability to turn the situation to his own ends. To make himself known, though not his motive. What a skil he had.

I unwrapped myself from her and gave her a nudge away. She took the hint and wandered off back to the others. I watched her go, feeling a bit like I did the day when I saw my wife Emily careful y packing up my suitcases the day I got the boot. As if there was at least one major, important, perhaps even life-changing conversation left that had somehow gone unsaid.

“Don’t get involved with her,” Gray told me.

“Involved? I met her three minutes ago. And she’s a mental patient.”

“Stil —”

We didn’t have to look into each other’s eyes to look into each other’s eyes. We were doing it right now, even though we stood there glancing around at nothing. I sipped my non-alcoholic beer, and the more I drank of it, the more I wanted real liquor. I was starting to sweat, the tension between us growing in silence.

I broke it by asking, “How many of these folks are guests of the Clinic and how many are friends of the guests?”

“You’re the only non-resident today.”

“But where is the staff? The orderlies? The doctors?”

“This is a very self-sustained facility. The patients are considered no immediate threat to themselves or one another. At least fifty percent are here on a voluntary basis.”

“And the other half have been committed?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.” I scanned the area and saw the chicks in bikinis now wrapped in sarongs mingling among the others. “But these folks—” I wasn’t sure how to say it.

“Yes?” he prodded.

“Wel , no one seems to be in a state of particularly extreme emotional duress.”

“There are plenty of schizoids, paranoids, catatonics, spiraling obsessives, extreme bipolars, and dissociative identity and dementia praecox cases in your presence.”

The show off. “Wel , they throw a fun party. Is the therapy real y that good or is it just the little green pil s?”

“A combination of both, but some guests have their setbacks. A teenage girl committed suicide two days ago. After four weeks of intense therapy, antidepressants

and

mood

suppressants

the

psychiatrist in charge of her case felt she was stabilized enough to go for a walk around the grounds.”

I knew the story was going to be very ugly because Gray was relating it without any outward emotion at al . But the corner of his mouth was turning up even higher into the twisted angling of an anguished smile.

It was his tel . You looked for that little tweak of a grin, and if you saw it you understood that he was ripping himself up deep inside. His frenzy never stayed there for long though.

“Gray, why did you mention Jazrael?”

He either didn’t hear me or he chose to disregard me. His fingers flexed repeatedly. “She scoured the compounds for cigarettes and butts and burned-out filters. She col ected quite a number apparently, even though a slim girl would only have to eat as few as a dozen to go into a seizure from nicotine poisoning. On average it takes sixty to ninety minutes before symptoms begin.” His lip kept curling until the entirety of one incisor loomed into view. “Can you imagine the wil it must take to sit and swal ow forty or fifty half-smoked cigarettes stamped under shoe heels covered in mud and dog shit?”

“Gray—”

“Can you imagine? The fortitude it would take to chew them down and wait alone for an hour and a half before the nausea and dizziness gave you fits extreme enough to crack your vertebrae?”

On bad days I could visualize it perfectly, and he knew it. He looked into my face and I realized it wasn’t the dead girl or troubles at home or the angel with her burning wings buried on the Isle of Dogs that was bending him out of shape. It was me. It was always me. He glared with a kind of dignified hatred.

Endlessly destructive but also narcissistic.

There are very few things that can stop your pain, and one of them is your lifetime rage. There is no sadness in al -consuming hate.

Your crosshairs focused perfectly on the one target that lay half-hidden in the distance, or might be standing right up in front of you holding a non-alcoholic beer.

A smal growl came up from the back of his throat, and another one from mine. How easy it is to fal back to your weakest state. The one you try to deny with your intel ect and your reason and al your measured propriety. But when you got down to it, it didn’t take much to snap you back into being the worst person you’d ever been and ever could be.

I scanned the room, wondering if I should make a break for it. If I could run away from the fight that was coming. I saw Trudy talking animatedly on a black wal phone.

“Gray, stop. Quit it!”

“Ninety minutes of the most intense loneliness you’ve ever felt, waiting to die in the dark? Like an animal. Can you imagine? The will, and the amount of self-hatred?”

I moved, dodging to the left but knowing it wasn’t going to be enough. I braced myself as Gray swung his fist around, powered by a dozen agonies I knew of and more I could only guess at.

It was foolish to shout. He couldn’t hear anything anymore but the thrashing of his own mind. Even his own thoughts would dim before the torrent of his memories, the crushing burden of his outrage. He would be blind too, with black lights dancing along the edges of his vision, a bril iant but obscuring haze. And in the darkness there, inches out of sight, would be al his despair and the tender traps of his madness.

I knew because I was the same. I saw that heinous smile smeared across his face, the one that told me I wasn’t as hard as him anymore, or as strong, or as ful of fury, although I could be, at any second of the day. It would just take the smal est prod to send me back to being what he was now.

It was an oddly appealing thought. A growl I recognized broke from his throat. I pivoted and tried to duck but he was already working my ribs. I let go of the beer bottle instead of smashing it over his head. It was stupid to hold back. Civility might be the death of me.

Several short jabs slammed into my bel y as he worked my midsection in a matter of seconds. He’d been primed to go from the first minute. Al the rest of it—the apparent calm, the tan, the leisurely repose—

had just been an act he hadn’t even been aware of performing.

But of course I had known that from the moment I’d answered the phone, and stil I showed up. I wanted to be here.

Perhaps I wanted to die beneath his hand. Or murder him with my own. Maybe I wanted to see if he could return me back to the voices of thunder, where a servant of heaven rotted in the sand and weeds.

Gray swung hard at my temple twice, opened his mouth, and came at me with his teeth.

4

WHEN THEY DO NOT BELIEVE

WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY

AND NEITHER DO YOU

“She who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries—”

“— who is set over mankind and over chaos and over spirits, queen of paradise, ruler over serpents and cherubim.”

“Who

is responsible for overseeing the repentance of sinners and the growth of boys into men.”

“She who is the shining light laid over the eyes of children.”

I snapped awake with my hands reaching for the nearest throat.

Maybe it was my own. My neck hurt like hel and I hacked for a minute, trying to get rid of the furry pain there. A glass of water was pressed to my lips. I sipped and sputtered.

The weight of the past sat heavily in my chest.

History had moved forward to find me again, and the world was tinged red and black.

world was tinged red and black.

“How do you feel?” someone asked.

My vision focused. I was in an office, lying on a firm leather couch. I could discern the subtle impressions of the hundreds of people who’d lain on it before me.

For a moment their troubles and frustrations, like smal fists, pushed out against my back. Gray had lain here many times before, and I could sense his hang-ups by the remaining indentations in the leather. I eased my body down harder and the tension drifted off.

I found myself staring at a grandfatherly type who was smiling with bad dentures and trying to appear pleasant, winsome, and disarming. It made me very nervous.

I tried to sit up but the pain had broken over me in an awful torrent, and I let out a grunting squeal that sounded worse than my struggling transmission. Gray always did like to work the body. A heavy hand on my forehead pushed me against the cushions. “Relax. Lie stil .” Then after a moment. “Eddie?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Of course, or I wouldn’t have said yeah, right?”

“Certainly.”

He let out a chuckle that didn’t sound much different from a kid torturing a toad. I wasn’t going to like this guy and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I opened my eyes. He had a tight white beard, thick square glasses, too much forehead and not enough nose. I couldn’t see how he might possibly kiss a woman without denting her face. He wore a red button-up sweater with brown trousers that were too short. Brown suede shoes but no socks. I found it presumptuous on his part that he believed he could fit into polite society without wearing socks.

He sat in a leather wing-backed chair that matched the couch. He had his knees crossed and I could see half his pale calves cross-thatched by varicose veins.

A notepad was open laid out across his upper thigh.

He smoked a pipe although he clearly didn’t enjoy it.

Smoke wreathed his cheeks and clung to his mustache. A low rumbling, consistent rasp worked through his smal frame.

“How do you feel, Eddie?” he repeated. There was a heavy hint of concern in his voice, as if he was afraid of lawsuits and media attention.

“Like my best friend just went psycho on me. Again.

Who are you?”

“I am Dr. Howards. I’m the primary administrative officer and chief of staff at this facility.”

It always annoyed the hel out of me when people didn’t give me their first names just so they could augment the il usion they were superior and deserving of immediate respect. It was one of the ways certain folks tried to subtly influence themselves upon the rest of humanity.

I made the effort to sit up again and managed to make it this time. I checked myself over. Someone had done a nice job of taping my battered ribs, and there was a swathe of gauze around my head. I remembered holding Gray’s throat and shoving him off me until a couple of patients pul ed him away. It looked like he hadn’t been able to bite any chunks off me, but I had teeth marks rimming both my hands.

“Let me understand the situation,” Howards said, and he took a moment to strike a wooden match and light his pipe, even though it was already lit. It was a delaying tactic, a way for him to pause and gather his thoughts and set a dramatic tone. It would’ve worked a lot better if his pipe hadn’t been lit. “You came up to the Clinic to visit Mr. Gray and didn’t bother to checkin with any of the staff or—”

“Hold it. He invited me.”

“Mr. Gray invited you?”

“He said there’d be cake.”

Howards glowered and let out a lengthy sigh through his nostrils. He wasn’t nearly as adept at it as me. “And you never stopped to consider that since Mr. Gray is in this institution because some months ago he attempted to kil you, perhaps your presence here might only cause him a significant emotional upset? I should think you’d have declined his invitation.”

“Cake and non-alcoholic beer, doc,” I said. “I’m only human. I couldn’t resist. And he is my friend. And besides, there was nowhere to check in. The guy at the front gate waved me on without even asking my name.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Yeah, wel , despite your lack of imagination, it’s the truth. What the hel kind of security do you have around here?”

“The best,” he said, crossing his knees the other way, and sounding self-assured on the matter. “For the protection of our guests. But we also expect visitors to fol ow a few simple rules.”

I glared at him. “Then you should make the fuckin’

visitors aware of that upon their arrival.”

“We do.”

I lurched up and made it to my feet by grabbing hold of the arm of the couch. Gray had been a hel of a boxer once and hadn’t lost his touch of unleashing a fierce, concentrated flurry.

“You can’t leave yet, Eddie. You have several severely bruised ribs and you took a bad knock to the head. You should at least spend the night in our care.

Or if you prefer, I can cal for an ambulance from the county general, which is some twenty-five minutes away. I’m afraid we’re quite isolated here in Griffinsvil e.”

“And Gray?” I asked.

Howards sucked cautiously on the pipe, trying not to hack. “Yes? And Gray...?”

“What did you do to him?”

“Oh, you mean punishment? No, nothing like that for our guests. He’s back in his cottage.”

I was beginning to believe that I had been terribly misled by books and drive-in movies al my life. At the very least they should’ve been using fire hoses on him, leaving him naked and shuddering in some windowless cel ar. I was a little disappointed that he’d gotten that chance to beat the shit out of me and hadn’t even received a firm talking to about it.

“Is it true a teenage girl committed suicide here by eating cigarettes?”

Howards leaned in a bit, bouncing his knee, the notepad slapping, the overhead light reflecting off the whiteness of the flesh of his leg. “What’s this?”

“That’s what he told me. That a girl recently kil ed herself here with nicotine poisoning.”

“No no, that’s quite ridiculous. Of course nothing like that has happened.”

“He seemed to believe it.”

“Mr. Gray does occasional y exhibit some delusional characteristics. Your presence at the Clinic appears to have caused him a slight setback.”

“Yeah, you set him back al the way to his bungalow.”

Dr. Howards exhibited a quality that I was familiar with and had long ago learned to despise. I could sense that he held some secrets close to him—not his, but someone else’s—and considered it to be a powerful intoxicant to revel in. Gray used to play this game too, in the ring, when he knew he was much better than his opponent and could toy with the guy at wil .

I waited for whatever Howards had up his sleeve, and he didn’t make me wait for long.

“Eddie, I have a rather important question.” He paused, expecting me to cut in, but I merely watched him. He sucked the pipe a little more enthusiastical y, but now it had gone out. He’d already played out his dramatic lighting of the match game and didn’t want to reproduce the gesture, so he pretended it was stil lit.

I was growing even more skeptical of psychiatry as a valid science.

We are al imprisoned by our own inertia. The longer I stood there, hunched and gritting my teeth against the pain, waiting for this guy, these people, to get around to asking pointed questions about Jazrael, she who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries, and what we did on the Isle of Dogs with her, and to her, the more I felt like it was me actual y trapped in this crackpot palace.

My thoughts twisted along to every movie I’d ever seen where the split personality only imagines he has a best friend, while everybody else in the story played along, so goddamn certain that they were more clearheaded than the poor schmuck talking in two voices, wearing his two faces.

When you got down to it, you could never be sure of your own sanity. You just had to guess at it. You had to hope that you were never the craziest fuck in the room.

So I waited. Howards shifted his little body in his chair and said, “Please explain the event.”

“What event?”

“The act of violence that led Mr. Gray into our care.”

“There was no event. He attacked me and tried to strangle me. At first with his hands and then with his belt.”

“Why?”

Boredom can only ful y be shattered by violence.

Nothing else wil quite get the job done. Our sedentary lifestyles turned us into masonry. The only way to get moving was to sometimes throw a punch.

But Howards wouldn’t understand any of that. I said,

“He does things like that on occasion.”

He wanted to ask why again but thought better of it.

“And what happened?”

“I fought him off and I stopped him. His landlord cal ed the cops and he was arrested. While in jail he tried to hang himself with his belt. They don’t real y take it away like you see in the movies.”

Another misleading bit of information from Tinseltown. Maybe I should stop taking b-flicks so seriously.

“What is the Isle of Dogs, Eddie?”

I told the truth, but not the truth he wanted to hear. It was funny how that worked sometimes. “A place where Gray and I used to go camping and fishing when we were kids. A spit of land out on one of the state parks of Long Island.”

“Why is it cal ed that? The Isle of Dogs?”

“In the summers visitors would bring their pets with them, and the dogs would run out there at low tide and get stuck when the water came in.”

He seemed a tad surprised that I’d answered so easily and honestly. “And what happened there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was there ever an incident that took place there?”

Again with the serene posing. I could just imagine what his circles of conversation must’ve been like back in his col ege weed-smoking days, passing the bong around.

“You mean besides camping and fishing? No.”

Howards pursed his lips, flipped open his little notebook and started jotting notes. He gazed distantly formulating his notes, using his left hand to move the pipe through the air. I got the distinct impression that I was not being believed.

“How old were the two of you?”

“Thirteen or fourteen. We used to take the train out of Penn Station. We went for a couple of years.”

“Why did you stop going?”

“We both got jobs early.”

“Have you noticed that you’ve grown exceedingly tense since I posed my question?”

“It’s only moderately tense, and I’m always like this.”

I did however wonder why the hel I was subjecting myself to this. Instead of this line of interrogation and cross-examination, he should be asking me why I had such a masochistic streak. That was something I’d be interested in learning.

“Did the two of you engage in sodomy while on these ‘camping trips’?”

Jesus Christ, the pervie bastard. He had his pen poised over his little book, his hand trembling slightly.

I checked out his eyes until he dropped his gaze, and I thought, okay, Dr. Howards did have a few secrets of his own. But everyone does. “Doc, if I didn’t have a busted rib, I might have to take a swing at you. What did Gray say happened there?”

“I’d rather not divulge that at this time.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes.”

He started writing even more quickly, with a real exhilaration now, noting how I’d threatened him, how I had dark, naughty proclivities, how repressed I was about my adolescent yanking sessions, and making al kinds of connotations on what might have happened between two boys on a track of wetland where dogs ran wild.

A knot of suspicion thickened at the base of my spine when I thought about how Gray had probably set this up. Toying with Howards and laying the groundwork for al these garbled and mistaken diagnoses, just so I’d be made uncomfortable in this hot seat someday.

Gray had foresight, and if it’s one thing he knew how to do wel , it was predicting which way I’d jump.

I started for the door. Howards almost dropped his pipe. We were just getting to the good stuff.

He licked his obscenely red lips and I told him, “I have a novel to work on.”

“Yes, you’re a writer. Is this the ‘book’ you can’t finish, yes? Another dark ‘fantasy,’ like those of Mr.

Gray’s?”

How subtle. At least he didn’t actual y do the quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

“Similar,” I told him. “Except mine are published.

Most of them anyway.”

He perked up so much that the pipe stem clacked off his bottom teeth and made his eyes twitch. “I would very much like to read some of these books. One of these fantasies.”

“Al you’ve got to do is walk into a bookstore and pluck them off the shelf. Wel , some might be special orders.” They al were now, mostly backstock stuck in warehouses in the publishers’ basements.

Stil , a sale was a sale.

Smoothing his beard, Howards started writing in the air with his pipe stem again, formulating his dirty thoughts. The word fantasy clearly excited him. He stared at me but the pen was now moving along the pad, like he was trying to mesmerize me into not noticing.

“Doc, you’ve got a hard-on. Bad form in front of the guests, you know?”

He looked down into his lap. Then his eyes nearly backflipped in his skul because I’d actual y mentioned his erection, and that gave him a whole new bevy of twisted, lurid imaginings and psychoses to consider.

I wobbled out into the corridor and unraveled the bandage from my head.

Orderlies and guards were al over the grounds.

Guys in blue uniforms, white uniforms. There was a team of landscapers out even though it was dark.

They were working like hel beneath the huge security lights. Picking up cigarette butts with great overwhelming care and precision of form.

5

THE LOVE OF SAD MOTEL ROOMS,

VALIDATION OF PARANOIA,

(LYING) ON THE BED

I drove over to the motel Gray had mentioned and got a room with a window that faced the little town of Griffinsvil e. He was right. Three stop lights and lots of antique shops. A breakfast diner at one end of the main strip, and a supper diner at the other. If there were any tourists in town, I couldn’t spot them. Of course, except for the motel manager and the occasional pickup truck and eighteen-wheeler that went by, I didn’t see anybody. Gray had told the truth.

No other friend or family member of the guests of the Clinic had come in for the hootenanny. The lure of cake and non-alcoholic beer didn’t prove to be the irresistible bait for others as it was for me.

But I liked motels. They had a built-in sleaze factor that intrigued my underdeveloped, repressed pervie nature, and they also had a Middle America milieu that appealed to my white bread, vanil a disposition.

Disco was dead by the time I was old enough to ask a girl to a middle school dance. By the mid-80s, sex and cocaine and the New York notorious night club scene had given birth to a new brand of prestige.

A hundred centuries of our Italian heritage and traditions couldn’t stand before the glitter bands and vapid slickness of Miami Vice. And just when my generation was about to break across the wal of adolescence, AIDS tore down al the hot spots and guiltless screwing in dark corners and motels that charged by the hour.

So maybe Howards wasn’t so wrong to focus his attentions on his patients’ use of their pee-pees. But it stil didn’t mean I had to put up with that shit.

I spent the afternoon in a woozy semi-conscious state, nursing my bruised ribs, watching shitty cable, and peeking out the window at the town where farmers and rural workers didn’t live half as nicely as the nutjobs in their little cottages. I was surprised the local community hadn’t risen en masse and stormed the Clinic, burning the bungalows and running off with the chicken parm heroes.

A knock at the door made me snap up so hard in the bed that I had to suppress a cry.

“She who is the shining light laid over the eyes of children.”

I answered the door. It was Trudy, the girl from the cabana next door to Gray’s, who’d asked about the oatmeal raisin cookies but had instead brought brownies to the hootenanny. I was stil struggling with my sense of betrayal over that.

There was a clear and distinctly cold manner about her now. Gone were the eager eyes and the cautious smile. She carried a new air, one of refined control.

Unlike before, she now met my gaze dead-on. Al the heartfelt imagery of the two of us waving to neighbors and drinking lemonade with our kids Sarah and Mortimer went straight to hel .

“Trudy,” I said.

“Please cal me Doctor Ferrara, Eddie.”

Another one who wanted to put me in my place. I held the door wide and she slipped inside like every married woman entering into a doomed affair that I’d ever written about.

“Sorry I can’t offer you anything. No beer or wine here. Not even a soda. Certainly no apple fritters, brownies, or oatmeal raisin cookies.”

She simply stared at me with an academic frown, trying to unwrap each layer of skin until she was down in my blood. We waited like that for a while. I lay back on the bed and she sat in the only chair in the room. I swore that if she took out a pipe or a little pad, I’d jump out the window and run shrieking over the highway. She did neither, and merely continued to look at me without expression.

“So, there was more staff around than Gray thought,” I said. “Posing as patients. I suspected that when I saw you on the phone at the dance.”

“The administration feels it’s better that way,” she told me. “Our guests respond more natural y and we can help guide them back to recovery with a minimum of additional emotional intrusion.”

For some reason that struck me so funny that I burst out laughing. At the back of my mind I knew that I real y shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing in front of a psychiatrist, but I couldn’t help myself. “Al it proves is that the paranoids aren’t nearly paranoid enough.”

“It’s an advanced form of experimental therapy which has thus far gotten extremely beneficial results.”

“From Gray?”

“Yes.”

Things started clicking into place. “That’s why you showed up at the cottage. Because you heard he and I starting to argue.”

“Yes. He was obviously becoming agitated. I attempted to ease the situation.”

“But you’re not supposed to interfere with animals in the wild.”

“Excuse me?” she said, trying to look pissy about my comment, but not quite able to pul it off.

“Nothing. Hey, tel me, the girls in the bikinis—?”

“They’re graduate students doing their internships at the Clinic.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“It’s one of the strategies I like least about this form of therapy, but our male guests respond very positively to it.”

“No shit!”

She huffed. “Real y, Eddie, it’s extremely therapeutic. Surrounding one with such beauty. It’s no different than artistic remedy. The staff itself can also act as treatment by their very character.”

“You’re the sweetie pie girl next door. They’re the hot gorgeous bimbos who ignored the nerds in high school. And the elderly Nurse Bradley? The loving grandma?”

“To an extent it’s fantasy fulfil ment.”

It probably was. I figured it just might work. It sounded insane enough to work, and I thought it might actual y help some of the poor mooks, at least for the time they spent in their delusional paradise funny farm.

I also found it exploitive and manipulative. But I thought that about pretty much everything.

Trudy continued, and I could hardly see the innocent girl in her now. It made me feel overwhelmingly sad for a minute. “The very fact that so many mental health facilities are staunch, overbearing, even frightening places may have a detrimental effect on the patients.

You take people who already have a social unease, resentment, jealousies, and other emotional disorders and traumas and then further remove them from normal society. We try to address the individual with whichever staff members might provide the most comforting effigy or archetype needed in their treatment. Then their transition back into society wil be established much more smoothly and with less tendency to revert back to their former aberrant behavior.”

So Gray needed a couple of coochie mamas out in a pool to gaze over, and the sweetheart gal to slow dance with him and bake him brownies whenever he wanted them.

I was starting to get a headache. “And when did the Clinic begin this trial approach?”

“Approximately the same time your friend arrived.”

“Six months ago. And what’s your rate of success?”

“The results yet to be determined.”

“I see.”

“Only a few patients have returned to their previous social settings and the data is stil being correlated.”

The state board behind the Clinic was going to have a shitstorm of hel fire coming down on it soon.

Which one of the guests would ever want to return to the fears, addictions, and dread of the world when they had paradise on a stick inside the Clinic?

They would never want to leave. No wonder everybody looked so sane and happy. They were.

Inside the bin. The minute they were kicked loose again, they’d be twice as fucked up as before. They’d be lonely for the camaraderie, the dances, the happy lobster faces, the fritters and chicken parm sandwiches, their little pil s handed out by sweet old ladies. They’d be making false suicide attempts by the hundreds, slitting their wrists and downing tranquilizers in an effort to get back into Club Lunatic.

Were Doctor Howards and Trudy real y so naive and near-sighted to believe there could be any other outcome?

I had another burning question. “What about Cheyenne Califa?”

Trudy—Dr. Ferrara—weighed her words careful y, playing it so close to the vest that I could see the granite wal going up. “She’s a guest with a sorrowful past.”

“And what would that past consist of?”

“Why are you asking?”

“She seemed to mean something to Gray.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

These people and their bland imaginations. When somebody starts off with a lie and goes to such extremes to tel you that there are half-truths abounding—for the good of others—you knew you were dealing with someone who would pick and choose the facts that only benefitted her cause.

“But I’m not here to talk about her, Eddie.”

“No, I didn’t think so.”

I appreciated the two-prong attack. First the old man takes a stab at me, and then he gives his information to Trudy here and she comes in for a fol ow-up assault. But for what purpose? To what end?

She was good at her job and must’ve sensed my lingering interest in her. I couldn’t help my natural draw to her sensuous, sweet good looks despite the frigid posturing now. You found a man’s weakness and struck it. This was the way emperors were deposed, this was how wars were lost.

Her compel ing eyes grew fierce until they blazed.

“Eddie,” she said in a tone similar to my mother’s when I’d broken her good crystal. “What happened out there? On the Isle?”

“You real y don’t want to know, lady.”

“I’d like an answer please.” Again, speaking in the authoritative role, brooking no opposition, trying to force me to answer through the sheer force of her wil .

It wasn’t working. The game had been fouled up.

Trudy already existed in one role for me, and couldn’t switch to another in the middle of this play.

“No.”

“Don’t you want your friend to heal?”

“What makes you think he hasn’t? What makes you think he’s not exactly who he’s supposed to be?”

“But he tried to kil you.”

“Yeah.”

“Twice as a matter of fact.”

“More times than that.”

“But why?”

“Because he hates himself.” The look on her face made me sneer. “You people are so ful of yourselves.

Did you ever think that once you had a thread of somebody’s guts in your hands, it might be a bad thing to unravel it?”

“Not if he’s suicidal or homicidal.”

I swung off the bed and moved around the room, feeling caged and wired, but also vital for the first time in months. “Who the hel isn’t nowadays? You must have quite the file on me as wel , if he talks as much to you about his life as I suppose he does. But I’m not one of your guests, your patients, your experiments or whatever else you want to cal our good buddies in the bin.”

“Please don’t keep using al these euphemisms and making such negative stereotypes, Eddie.”

“Ah, baloney.” The way she said my name was beginning to real y jab at me. “By the way, what’s your first name? Is it real y Trudy?”

“I’d rather not divulge that at this time,” she told me, stil seated so austere and proper in the chair.

“What a surprise.” I don’t know why, but seeing her like that, pretty but aloof, refusing to tel me her name, somehow washed al the rage from me. It left me then, and some of the weakness and pain returned. It was if she had wound me up so much that my spring had snapped. “I think we’re done here, Dr. Ferrara.”

“I’d like to read some of your work. Do you have any of your books with you?”

“No.”

“Not in the car?” she asked.

“No.”

“Real y?” She leaned forward and got a little sloe-eyed, grinning as if she saw through my pretenses which weren’t pretenses.

“Why would I lie about not having copies of my books in my trunk?”

“I thought most authors had copies of their novels on hand to sel to potential fans.”

“I’m not very good at sel ing my books, and I don’t have many fans.”

“Wel , I’m sorry to hear that, Eddie.”

“I bet.”

I could wel imagine why she was so interested.

She’d like to compare my work to that of Gray’s, and see where our themes and symbols overlapped. What fictions we’d created and what truths we’d refashioned to suit our own designs.

Trudy stood and reached into her pocket. She handed me a couple of tiny blue capsules.

“Here are some sedatives. They’l help you sleep tonight despite your discomfort.”

I said thank you and immediately decided to flush them.

Her bottom lip firmed as our hands touched. I got the impression she wanted me to make the attempt to jump her bones just so she could make notes about it.

So she could entangle me even more deeply into the bizarre play they were performing up there at the Clinic. Gray might be the leading man, but I thought he somehow had a more direct hand in the whole show, as if he might be directing it, even this scene, right now, from afar.

6

A BEAUTIFUL PAST DESTROYING ITSELF

BEFORE THE EYES OF THE CREATION,

BUT NOT FOR YOU

Two days later, back in the city, Gray’s first wife, Nola, found me in the 59th Street subway station waiting for the downtown C train. She swept up behind me like the shadow of a huge raven and enveloped me before I could react. I was stil slow from the battered ribs.

I liked Nola, even though she often scared the hel out of me. She hit 5’11” even without her boots, which she always wore, and she stood there towering above me, her lengthy black hair brushed out in a wild mane, the black leather coat huge with flared cuffs and hem.

Nola looked very much like a new age superhero destined to battle demons and other occult forces to save the rest of humanity. It was a role she wore wel , but one that had subtly impressed itself on her over the years. Gray had cast her as the protagonist in his first three novels and he’d somehow influenced her with his personality and force of his creativity. Until the girl I’d met back when we were teenagers was no longer recognizable.

Gray hadn’t written about this character “Dahvana, Vampire Huntress” in nearly a decade, but Nola couldn’t shake the persona he’d invented for her. She held on to it the way she tried to hold on to Gray himself, with the strength of her resolve and terror of loneliness. So far as I knew, she’d never so much as dated another man since Gray abandoned her, except for me.

With each new year she’d been forced to sublimate herself further and further into the role. Her black makeup was thick but perfectly applied, as if by an ancient Egyptian artist. I spotted the edges of extensive tattoos making their way around her wrists and up her throat. It annoyed me to think about what she must look like beneath her Dahvana outfit. The character had been attacked by al manners of night creatures, from bestial shapeshifters to living golems and sea serpents rising from the East River. Dahvana had many scars, and I couldn’t help thinking about Nola clawing and cutting herself to mimic the wounds of a second-rate character written by a man who no longer loved her.

She had once worked for a modeling agency doing mostly evening wear catalogues. I knew that she’d digressed—if you could cal it that—to doing nudes on the web, mostly posing for Goth and fetish sites, but I hadn’t kept too close an eye on her for the past couple of years. I didn’t know if she was doing the same thing now or had gone even deeper into the underground.

Dahvana had something of a cult fol owing. Monty Stobbs had managed to sel rights to a gaming company that produced a fairly popular software game, but I didn’t know how involved Nola might be with that, if at al .

As usual, I got the feeling that I should be much more on top of things than I actual y was.

She noticed my bruises and said, “You’ve seen him.”

“I could’ve just been mugged, you know.”

“I know his teeth marks. He’s had some dental work.”

“Jesus.” I knew Gray had fucked her up pretty good during their marriage, and afterwards, but Christ. I checked my hands and the indents were faint but stil there.

“Tel me how he’s doing,” she said as the C train lumbered into the station. I started for it and she placed her hand on my shoulder. Not grabbing, not pul ing, simply leaving it there so that the gravity of her need moved up through her and into me. I looked at the train and al the folks getting on, and then I watched it pul out and roar away.

Turning, I shrugged her hand away and said, “Nola, it’s seventy degrees on a nice spring day. Why are you wearing that get-up?”

“What does that mean?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“These are my clothes, Eddie.”

She had to be sweltering, but the pale skin of her face appeared cool, even cold. She had grown so comfortable in the disguise that it was no longer a masquerade. This was her entirety now, and I had to stop holding on to a past that no longer existed.

For a brief time after they’d split, I thought maybe she and I could be right for each other. I’d felt the increasingly apparent possibility that I might be in love with her. We spent a lot of time together then, in each other’s beds and lives, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that she stil wanted Gray and somehow expected me to help her get him back. It’s a discouraging experience to be on top of a woman, making al the love you can, and seeing in her eyes the boundless adoration for another man.

I had enough ghosts. I didn’t need to be haunted by one from a guy who was stil alive. Especial y under the goddamn covers.

“He’s fine, Nola. In fact, he’s better off than I am.

Probably you too. That Clinic is heaven compared to the Upper West Side.”

“Is he working again?”

“Yes. He’l probably knock out a bestsel er while he’s there.”

“Don’t make fun,” she said, and hit a pose like Dahvana about to use her magical crossbow to send a silver spike into the chest of some child of darkness.

“You think I am?”

“Does he seem any better? Any...happier?”

“His left jab is stil pretty good, and I guess his teeth are much nicer. By the way, thanks for al fuck’s sake for asking how I’m doing.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she had the good grace to actual y sound it. She loomed over me and I felt like I should get up on tiptoes to save my dwindling sense of masculinity.

“What are you doing in this part of town?” I asked.

“I was just going to Friedkin’s bookshop.”

Stil looking for Gray’s out of print novels, storing them up and giving them away to anyone who showed the slightest interest in his work. Doing more for his career out on the street than Monty Stobbs or any other agent or lawyer Gray ever had.

“I meant in life, Nola. In general, you know?”

“Stil modeling.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not porn, Eddie.”

“I know.”

“And it’s none of your business even it was.”

“Sure,” I said, and my bel y clenched tighter.

Possessive with the brutal iciness of knowing someone you once cared for is exposing herself to others.

Imagination is a cruel master to the jealous man. I was a petty person at heart, like every ex-lover, and I was more or less fine with that.

She might be showing her body off to every horny prick out there with a computer who liked to see tal women with tattoos, but her soul was stil Gray’s.

“You were wrong, you know.”

I let out a long, loud growl of disgust. It sounded more manly than a sigh. “Nola, don’t give me any shit, al right?”

“You were wrong, what you did to him. You have to make it right.”

We’d been going through this for years. Nola holding on to the tail end of some dream where she could turn back time if only somebody else did the right thing.

“Don’t you have some goddamn vampires to kil ?

Go on, Nola, get away from me.”

“You need to make it right again.”

“I would if I could, but it’s not possible.”

“Only you can cure him.”

“Taking me out of his life is like taking his past away. Take his past away and you take his madness away. Take his madness away and he’s not himself anymore. Don’t you understand that?” Nobody else had a grip on that pertinent fact yet except me, but no one else knew him as wel as I did either. Not his doctors, not his wives, nobody. “It’s the reason why I visited him. I wanted to see how long my very presence would take to unravel him. It was less than an hour. This is the way it’s always going to be, until one of us dies.”

“You can save him, and yourself. Just go back out there to that inlet. Go see what you buried in the sand.”

“You don’t know what the hel you’re talking about!”

She put her hand on my shoulder again, taking back the force she’d wil ed into me. I could feel it leaving me, releasing me from the spot. She moved off and I stood there waiting for the C Train again, except I’d forgotten where I was going.

7

I SNORT THE DEVIL’S DUST BUNNY

WITHOUT REJECTION

I worked my way with the throng up to the street. I wandered around for a while and even passed by Friedkin’s bookshop. I usual y stopped in and signed my old paperbacks for him, but lately they hadn’t been sel ing much and I didn’t want to appear even more desperate for attention than I already was.

After about an hour it started to rain and I found myself in the garbage-strewn doorway of Monty Stobbs’ office building. Maybe I’d intended to come here from the beginning, or maybe Nola had somehow sent me this way with her urging. I walked in and took the elevator to the third floor and tried not to notice how much water was coming in through the cracked plaster of the ceiling.

Monty didn’t look like a New York agent. Most of them wore thousand-dol ar suits and carried themselves as if they were celebrities who didn’t want the crust of a common humanity on their shoes. The ones I’d worked with I’d eventual y learned to hate, and they had hated me just as much.

But Monty looked like an L.A. porno producer in the early 80s, which is just what he’d been. He had on pink suspenders and a thin black tie that didn’t match his charcoal shirt. He had his sleeves rol ed up past his elbows. He was single-handedly doing his best to bring the shag mul et back into style.

I stepped inside the little waiting room and saw that his secretary, Candi, was slumped in her seat using two fingers to slowly peck at the keyboard. Her eyes kept closing as she wavered in the chair. She was fal ing asleep even with me standing right in front of her.

The stink of beer and bourbon wafted heavily around the room. I glanced at the screen and saw that she was sending out what was supposed to be an astoundingly positive letter about the bril iance of a manuscript cal ed I Snort the Devil’s Dust Bunny. For an initial fee of $250 Monty Stobbs would virtual y, nearly, practical y guarantee to sel the book for Mr.

Winslow Hurp.

Candi had been one of Monty’s finds, back in the day. She was twenty years out of the triple-X business but stil dressed to show off her tits. A wide cleavage in a skin-tight blouse. Once they’d been attributes that brought in the big cash. After two decades of too much sun, liquor, plastic surgery, and occasional carcinomas, I cringed at their exposure.

I moved behind the desk and gently led her to an old love seat in the corner. She al owed me to move her along even as she began to snore as she walked.

I maneuvered her to lie down and she said, “Not now, Monty. I had too much and don’ feel good.”

“Go to sleep, Candi.”

“Please don’ make me do it. Not again.”

“No,” I told her. “Never again.”

“No, no...”

What should have been a world of art, glory, and al iance was as ful of the weak, the beaten, and the depressed as anything else. There was probably an even greater percentage of us here than anywhere, brooding and jealous of one another, hateful, spiteful, but somehow stil striving. For who the hel knew what.

My regrets and failures were beginning to close in around me and I kept waiting for a shot of my old drive to push me back into the game. Maybe the ass-whupping by Gray would do the trick. I felt like I was nearly ready to get back to my novel and make it through the wal that had stopped me dead for so long.

Monty was at his desk going through a pile of manuscripts. He ran his scams like anybody else, but every now and again he did his job right and sold a book that wound up with al the notice and readers it deserved. He had a sharp eye when he took the time to actual y do line-edits and comment on a novel’s content.

With him, as with most of the people close to me in my life, I had a stew of feelings that ranged from mild affection to unstoppable loathing. The older I got, the more the rest of the pricks in the world became my brothers.

I walked into his dingy office and said, “Hel o, Monty.”

“Aw shit, am I gonna have trouble with you today, Eddie?”

“That depends on you.”

“If this is about Gray’s book, then forget it. He said you might show up sniffing around, and he gave me orders not to show you the manuscript.”

“Since when do you listen to your clients?”

“Since they start turning in books I can sel .”

It was a cheap shot but it tagged me pretty good.

“Yeah,” I said, “but could you do it if the writer wasn’t in the nuthatch?”

“The daytime talk shows eat this shit up. It reflects their own struggles. Everybody’s crazy and they know it, and they’re afraid of doing something just buggy enough to get their loved ones to commit them to the bin.”

I wasn’t about to argue.

He said, “When are you going to write me something like this?”

“I stil haven’t read it, so I can’t comment.”

“Oh yes you can. It’s mainstream, muscular, has depth and action, builds plenty of suspense to keep the readers intrigued with the story.”

Al particular attributes I would have said my own writing exhibited, but there’s nothing like an agent to put you in your place.

Monty sat back and toyed with his suspenders.

“How was it up there?”

“Better than Club Med.”

“What?”

“Seriously. He’s having a bal . When he’s not delusional or homicidal, that is.”

“Wel , so long as he’s having fun. Did you enjoy the cake?”

That stopped me. A lot of things were stopping me lately. “How did you know about that?”

“He told me you were going to visit.”

“When did he say that?”

“He cal ed me about week ago.” Monty frowned, slid away in his chair. “Jesus, what the hel are you making that face for?”

I didn’t know what he meant until I felt the pain in my teeth. I was smiling, my teeth champed down, and my breath was coming in tight, near-gasps. “Nothing.”

“You have a breakthrough on this book of yours yet?”

“Not quite, but I can feel it coming.”

“Good, get it to me. I can send you along the same circuit as Gray. You can talk about him.”

Monty eased even farther back but stopped short, his features contorting with alarm. I had my hands on his suspenders, tugging him forward. My forehead felt very hot and my hackles were freezing, and my heart hammered in my chest and I didn’t want to talk about Gray or writing anymore.

“Why is Candi so drunk at this time of day?” I hissed.

“It’s noon. What, that’s too early for you? What’s gotten into you, Eddie?”

“Tel me.” I hauled him forward inch by inch as the elastic of the suspenders threatened to snap. If they did, he’d slingshot through the office window and fly halfway across Columbus Avenue. “What do you do to her, Monty?”

“I don’t do anything. I made her what she is.”

“Exactly my point.”

“Don’t hit me, Eddie.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Monty. Nah, never, not you.”

My muscles were locked so tight that I was trembling.

“You scared for her?” He swatted at my hands but couldn’t break my hold, and was stil too nervous to get angry or struggle much. “You sound like you love her, Eddie. That it, you want her now?”

“You should never laugh at someone else’s loves or fears, Monty. Everybody’s got a weird love or strange fear. Don’t you know that?”

I said it as if I knew something dark and disturbing about him. His eyes swirled and he swal owed thickly.

I released him and walked out, took the stairs down leaping them four at a time. Uncertain why I was moving so fast, or why I should stop short when I opened the front door back onto the street.

The rain pummeled my face.

Jazrael hovered behind me, just out of sight. The ghost of a dead angel. I could feel the flames rising from her wings, the weight of my own darkness behind me.

8

WORDS LEFT BEHIND IN ALL

THE HIGH CORNERS,

THE FUCKIN’ NEW LAMP

I wanted to beat the shit out of somebody.

Even though my ribs stil hurt, the bitter need was there, steadily edging deeper into the back of my head, making my fists tighten. Gray had stirred the anger in me again.

I thought how much I’d like a crack at him now, but I didn’t want to drive the hour back upstate and deal with the guests, the staff, the security, and the suicides. So I decided on the next best thing.

I walked across town and took the 6 down to the East Vil age. Whenever I shut my eyes I saw blurred sentences printed on a page, but no matter how hard I tried to focus I couldn’t make the words clear up. I kept wondering if it was the next part of the story I couldn’t quite get down, or if my subconscious was tel ing me to go home and dust my apartment. In any case, I realized I shouldn’t be heading downtown on the 6 to visit with Emily.

She stil occupied the third-story walk-up we had lived in during our marriage. It was a fair-sized apartment for New York, with two bedrooms and two smal alcoves with brightly sunlit window seats. Emily loved curling up in one while she pored over her fashion books and jotted down ideas for designs. Half of our bedroom doubled as a workstation for her fabrics, sewing machines, and draft board.

I’d work in the guest bedroom and surround myself with novels, posters, rubber skeletons, action figures, comics, il ustrations, toy robots, stone idols and gargoyles, and about another ton and a half of clutter that I hoped would inspire me while I sat around clunking my skul against the desk.

Four years ago my ex-wife Emily hadn’t quite been ex yet. We were having our problems and spending too many nights caught up in terse, vague arguments that were more childish than anything. The slightest matter could become a major brawl. A misplaced book, a forgotten phone cal , a skipped kiss goodnight. We had somehow both become hypersensitive in the extreme, as if we were walking around a roomful of razors, nicking ourselves from every angle, and neither could do right by the other.

She met Mark Kutchman at a museum, a fucking museum in Manhattan on a spring day when novelists are smacking their heads against wal s trying to rattle loose their stories and pretty boys are frolicking in museums with other men’s wives.

As our troubles continued, Emily spent more and more time out of the house. She claimed I didn’t notice, but I did. I simply trusted her to be out at the places where she said she was going. Visiting with friends, relaxing in the park, clothes shopping. And technical y she was doing al that, it just happened to be with another guy she was fal ing in love with.

We had plenty of altercations, some passionate and some with a crushing, disdainful pressure of boredom. Stil , I was hopeful—I am nothing if not hopeful—and thought our life together would stabilize once we’d made it across the rough patches. Or that we’d accept the situation and continue with our routine and the force of our inertia would keep us comfortably rooted together. I’m a hel of a big believer in inertia.

The last time I had seen him he’d kicked the crap out of me in an upscale restaurant not far from here.

I’d walked in spoiling for a fight and was surprised as hel when he’d turned out to be a lot more brutal than I was. I would’ve thought my wife leaving me for another man would’ve given me an edge, a dark energy found only in the most difficult but righteous times. Instead, the muscular even-minded guy had taken me apart in front of about fifty witnesses who al told the cops the truth. He’d attempted to discuss matters like a gentleman and I’d gone after him, a maniac who’d wound up with half a plate of chicken cordon bleu and a vinaigrette salad on my head.

He shamed me even more by not pressing charges.

Now I stormed through the street door of the building as a young couple I didn’t recognize walked out. They looked back in fear as if realizing they’d made a mistake letting me in without my buzzing anybody in the building. But New Yorkers are busy, and they don’t have time to stop and try to correct every personal blunder or lapse in reason.

I clomped up the stairs, seething, wincing without knowing why, glowering with my eyes scrunched so tightly I could barely see. I banged on the door to my old apartment. It didn’t rattle in its frame anymore.

He’d fixed that.

Emily answered, wearing her reading glasses and with her hair tied back loosely, in sweats and a T-shirt.

Looking beautiful but engrossed. Perhaps even a touch harried, planning her next show.

She seemed almost unreal to me, as if I could pass my hand through her.

My agitated mood made the edges of my vision burn with a bright nimbus. She said, “Eddie, what are you doing here?”

“Hel o.” My voice, even with only speaking a single word, betrayed my intension. She was fast. She tried to slam the door in my face but I slid inside before she could shut me out. The door was heavy. Resistant and slow to open and close. He hadn’t fixed that.

One point for me. You had to keep score even in your stupidest, most insignificant games. You had to win at something, even if you had to make the contest up yourself. Sometimes the only way to win was to not tel everybody else that they were playing your dumb-ass game too.

“Jesus, Eddie, why are you here? What are you doing now?” Emily kept her voice hushed, which meant Kutchman was home. In my home. I began to smile. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew I was doing it.

“What are you into now?” she asked, and pressed her hands to my chest. Once it was a sign of desire, the way she moved against my body. She kept pushing at me, hoping to get me back out the door before Kutchman saw who it was. I should be yel ing for him, but that just wasn’t how this should go down.

No. I was moving back into the past, step by step. I had owned this apartment once, and it remembered me.

My stories had been taken from out of the air, composed from the dust in these corners. The paint flecks and the sunlight, the age and the energy from these wal s. And I’d left plenty of my own vision and substance behind. I could feel it throbbing al around me, and I opened myself to it and cal ed it back into my marrow again.

“Cal him,” I told her.

“No, please.”

“I just want to see him.”

Her hands tightened into fists and she dug her nails into my flesh. Again, it was once a show of lust. I began to become aroused. I stared at her lips and thought, what was the worst thing that could happen if I tried to kiss her?

Her nails began to rake down. “You don’t even love me anymore,” she said. “I’m not even sure you ever did. You don’t want me. You’re just searching for yourself.”

“Cal him.”

But there was no need. Kutchman was already emerging at the end of the hal , stepping out from what had once been my office and was his own now.

Kutchman was an architect who stil did plenty of construction work on the sites. He was the kind of man who took pride in every element of his life. From his work to his clothes to his appearance. He merged his creative interests with his physical ones, and was highly effective at them al . Handsome, with an air of dignity about him, even a gentleness amongst al his prowess and capability.

I hated every fucking molecule of him.

“What’s this?” he asked calmly. He took one look in my eyes and a slick little grin uncoiled across his face. “Are you back for more trouble?”

“Sure,” I told him.

Sick as it might’ve been, it was good to have someone like this in your life. A rival you could detest for no other reason than he had won the woman you’d lost. A woman you perhaps no longer even wanted and never truly had. In another life we could’ve been sparring partners in the ring who could cal each other up and train together, try to murder each other in the ring and then go out for a beer afterwards. There were normal ways to do the things we needed to do in this warped fashion.

“Leave this place,” he said.

“No.”

“Don’t force me to cal the police.”

“I won’t.”

He sighed at that—I could charge him for lessons—

and behind me Emily let out a sharp whine of frustration. I appreciated my position in the room, standing between the two of them now, remembering my stories. I glanced at the window frames, the floorboards, some of the furniture that had been here before. I could feel my inspiration finding me again, the themes that comprised my fiction and my life. The wine rack made me think of my father, the flower vases of my mother. The living room reminded of my bul shit sessions with Gray while we discussed events and trivia and sports and a thousand scattered topics which al somehow found their way into my words.

I had gone even more crazy in this home, and that was saying something.

Kutchman stood poised. He shoved the coffee table out of the way so we’d have some room. I walked in and almost felt like shaking his hand, the way two cultured, intel igent men wil before they try to maim one another.

With a moan Emily stepped up behind me, her breath on the back of my neck, and the skewer of my desire stabbed through my guts again and twisted, as I recal ed the murmurs of love she’d once whispered in my ear.

“Don’t hurt him too badly,” she told him.

Kutchman shook his head. “I’l try not to, but he looks drunk.”

“I don’t smel liquor,” she said.

“Perhaps vodka.”

“He used to hate it.”

“Perhaps no longer.”

“Don’t let him break the new lamp.”

“I won’t. Maybe he’s had a psychotic break.”

“It’s this thing with Gray, it’s driven them both to the edge.”

“More likely over it.”

“So it seems.”

“He does appear demented.”

“I knew he needed serious professional help.”

I stamped my feet like a furious child and shouted,

“Stop talking about me like I’m not even here!

Kutchman, put ‘em up!”

“‘Put ‘em up,’ Eddie?” He couldn’t believe it, and his smile got larger. “Is that what you said?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Put ‘em up!”

He put ‘em up and I slid forward.

Kutchman was thick and carved, but moved like a bantamweight. Despite the composed exterior and attitude of cultivation, he could pul up hel when he wanted it. I’d seen that the last time. Nobody learned to brawl like that without reaching into his own wel of wrath and disappointment.

Now I let it build in him. I eased around him and boxed the way Gray had taught me. Blocking and ducking instead of trying to pummel. Thinking about what would irritate him the most, rather than hurt him. I wove and slapped his cheeks, showing him I could trifle with him. That I didn’t have to be demented when it counted man to man.

My ribs flared with pain but that didn’t slow me. As we moved about the living room, with Emily watching, shaking her head at me, I caught more of my symbols, plots, motifs, and issues.

The deaths of my life that wound up on the page.

My fears and hurts, the subtle torments of everyday existence. My love and sins, Emily’s flesh, her hair across my lips. The sweet smel of sex and salvation, and redemption, however brief.

I didn’t live here but my work stil did. This place was imbued in the writing, and the writing was imbedded in the plaster. I cal ed my strength back to me.

Kutchman was sweating and panting. I was only half in the moment. He kept throwing roundhouses and clever jabs, but I slipped away and continued slapping him in the face. I started plowing into his gut. His eyes reddened and he came at me with a war cry. I kept knocking his rib cage and felt more and more satisfied every time he let out a bitter grunt. It was a good sound. Now I knew why Gray always went for them.

With a heave, Kutchman sort of threw himself at me, his jaw slack and his bottom lip hanging. His cheeks were a bright red like a child who’d just come inside from building an army of snowmen. He couldn’t hold his arms up any longer. Emily sobbed against the wal . Crying for him.

I blocked his weakening punches and shoved him onto the floor. I wasn’t done with him yet. I stepped into the kitchen and Emily wailed, “What are you doing? What are you doing now?”

“Continuing with my psychotic break,” I said. “By the way, nice fuckin’ lamp.”

I got to the kitchen drawer, yanked it open and grabbed a steak knife. Kutchman froze and his eyes widened for the first time with genuine fear.

I wanted to see him go crazy with hate.

I wanted to see him break down into a puddle of his basest emotions, and then I wanted to stomp him into the ground. I had written similar scenes to this many times before. So many times that the critics cal ed me repetitious. Interviewers asked me why I was stuck using the same images and narrative devices. I wished I could’ve invited them al to see this.

You can’t move beyond whatever it is that needs to be exorcized.

I threw him the knife. He gasped as it approached and he fumbled the blade in his hands. It flipped against his chest and plunged down to stick into the floor. He peered at a smal cut on his finger, a drop of blood wel ing. Good ole Mark Kutchman, who’d kicked the shit out of me in front of a restaurant ful of gawkers, and now he looked like he wanted to cry because he had a boo-boo.

“Use it, you prick,” I growled at him.

He glanced at Emily and said, “No.”

She shrieked at me, her fists battering at my back.

“Get out! Get out!”

I told him, “Do it.”

“No.” He sneered and the malice was alive and burning inside him. He threw the knife aside.

I stared into his eyes and knew he would’ve given it a go if she hadn’t been here. I grinned.

He wasn’t any saner than me.

9

ANOTHER ONE, RIGHT HERE,

WHO ASKS THE QUESTION

THEY ALL ASK (AND YOU ANSWER)

The storm inside wanted out. It screamed to be put down onto the page. I wrote for four days straight, hardly eating or sleeping and without going outside even once. I worked on the new novel for a while but realized it could wait. I’d gotten through the wal and the ending seemed clear to me now. For the moment, I had other stories to tel .

None of them were horror as I’d written in the field before. No supernatural creatures or occult matters, no cyborg assassins or alien possession. Instead I fil ed the pages with tales of lost men and women, the damned and the disturbed, the forgotten and the missing.

People who crawled the back al eys and stumbled through their disheartening trials, who’d never done much wrong in the world but had never done much good either.

The lackluster, the common, the average who had become weary of their own mindless mediocrity.

I had no idea what to do with the stories. Where to sel them, who to show them to. I was about as far out on the rim of my humble talents as I’d ever gone, and I stil wasn’t sure why. It seemed a grand waste. Al this sudden energy and I stil wouldn’t be making any money, garnering any new fans, or fulfil ing any contractual terms. I kept cal ing up the book on my computer screen, but the moment it appeared I’d click it off again. There was so much more to accomplish before I could get back to that, but I didn’t know what else I should be trying to do.

I sat sweating in my underwear stinking up the apartment, scratching my beard stubble and doing my best not to look in the mirror. It wasn’t difficult. It’s sometimes too great a chore to look at your own face.

Late in the evening of the fourth day, with a strong breeze blowing through the apartment, the hint of rain again in the air, I was lying on the couch enjoying the deep weariness in my muscles. I thought I might sleep wel tonight, for the first time in weeks. I’d printed out my seven new tales and had them neatly paper-clipped and stacked on the coffee table. I stil had no idea what to do with them.

A knock on the door roused me from the couch.

“She who is the shining light laid over the eyes of children.”

I threw some clothes on and answered.

It was Doctor Ferrara. Or Trudy, if that actual y was her first name. She’d refused to tel me.

“Hel o, Eddie.”

“Doctor.”

“May I come in?”

“You’re a little far from your usual stomping grounds aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

She walked in carrying a smal handbag that swayed at her side and patted her hip. She took careful notice of my disheveled appearance and the chaotic state of my apartment, which was unusual for me but not so odd for most bachelors in New York City.

If the Club Med of insane asylums had at least one token feces-smearing lunatic, maybe she wouldn’t be pul ing a face now. Her attitude seemed to be a mix of the two extremes I’d seen the first two times I’d seen her. Cold but with a makings of a smile. Control ed and determined, but also with a touch of familiarity, like we were old friends getting reacquainted.

“Dr. Howards and I thought it would be in Mr. Gray’s best interest to talk further with you.”

“I don’t suppose I have anything to say about it, eh?”

“Certainly you do. I’l leave if you’re uncomfortable.”

She was pretty damn smooth, giving the subtle implication that I had something to be scared about.

That if I didn’t talk to her I was somehow weak. I was a lot easier to fuck with than I’d ever previously considered. My visit to the Clinic continued to have aftereffects I never would have imagined.

I slid some old newspapers and pizza boxes off my lounge chair and said, “Not at al , Dr. Ferrara. Please sit. Tel me, how’s Gray doing?”

“As wel as can be expected.”

“That sounds faintly ominous. What’s wrong now?”

“He’s had something of a setback.”

“How so?”

“He’s stopped working since your visit. Also, he’s convinced that a girl committed suicide on the Clinic grounds by swal owing cigarette butts.”

I sat on the couch across from her. “Did she?”

“No, of course not.”

“You say that as if it’s inconceivable. It’s not. Not even at a bin posing as a resort.”

“Please, Eddie, it’s not a ‘bin.’” Her chin firmed up as if she might be preparing to argue, but then thought better of it. “However, what you say is true, it’s not inconceivable that there are occasional misfortunes.

But we wouldn’t hide the fact if such a tragedy had occurred.”

“Why not? You make a hel of an attempt to hide everything else from your special guests.”

She hit me with that glare again, making the effort to search down through my bones. I found it vaguely naughty.

“Why does he hate you so much?” she asked.

“Because we’re best friends.”

“Best friends don’t attack each other...” she said, but her voice petered out.

“That right? And lovers never kil each other. And al children are respectful of their parents. And nobody cheats on their taxes.”

I knew then that Howards had al owed her to take point on Gray’s case because she was bound to learn more from him, and more from me. How clearly we wear our needs on our sleeves, in our eyes, in the way we moisten our lips. Gray and I both wanted the girl next door despite our failed relationships with just such women. He was only a hair on that side of insane, and I was only a hair on this side, and maybe not even that.

“Please answer me,” she said.

“He hates me because I stole his first story.”

The answer took her back. She seemed to have thought she was only asking a rhetorical question.

“What do you mean?”

“It was about an angel named Jazrael.”

“And you stole his story?” Incensed, excited now that I’d admitted it. Her pretty knees began to bounce, and I stared at their dimples. I wondered if she was going to kick me. “Plagiarized it?”

Some things could never be explained. And why the hel should I have to discuss any of this with Gray’s doctors? If they’d been worth a damn, they could’ve gotten him to reveal his motivations, fractures, and hang-ups al on his own. The burden of my responsibility to him had to end eventual y, didn’t it?

Despite my resistance I stil found myself talking.

“We were out on the Isle of Dogs, camping. We talked about the idea al night long in our tent. We fashioned the tale together. In the morning we both went home and wrote our own stories on our fathers’ typewriters.

But Gray’s mother was a housewife. My mother was a secretary. She taught me how to type. I could do seventy words a minute even back then on a manual.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I finished my story first and showed it to him. So he never finished his.”

Her knees quit tapping, and I sighed. She skirted forward, forced me to look into her face. The icy mask melted around the edges. “Why do you say you stole it then? It was your story too.”

“I’m just tel ing you why he hates me. It goes back to that. Maybe further. I don’t know. You’re the one who needed an answer, not me.”

She stood and drifted to my bookcases. I’d published thirteen novels so far in my career, and Gray had published seven. In general, his were more literate, thoughtful, insightful, and far better reviewed.

Dhavana was stil considered a cornerstone by genre fans. But my sales were better and my output was large enough to attract a little more attention from publishers. He’d had enough movie interest to pay his bil s whereas I’d written three screenplays and gotten zilch from Tinseltown. It only served to make our drive and our resentment that much more concentrated, which was probably for the best.

It did my heart some good to see Trudy ignoring Gray’s novels and started pul ing my books down from the shelves, checking titles. Dead Hand of Purgatory.

The Swift and the Stunned. Carotid. Jugular.

Corroded by Love. Brother of Darkness.

“May I have these?” she asked.

I tried not to sigh. Everybody in the world had way too much fuckin’ gal when it came to getting free copies of a book off the author. I should ask for a free steak from a butcher or get an oil change for nothing.

“Sure,” I told her.

“Was he abused as a child?”

“Yeah.”

“By his father?”

“No.”

“His father was a drunk wasn’t he?”

“No.”

“He references wine whenever he speaks of his father.”

“That’s because his father was a wine sel er.” She gave me a look like she thought I was being facetious.

“A wine seller, doctor, not a wine cel ar. Get it?”

“But he hates his father.”

“He hates everyone he loves.”

“And your father?”

“What about him?”

“How do you feel about your father? He speaks of your father nearly as often as his own, and seems to occasional y reverse them.”

“My dad was the same type of man as his. Strong, personable, hardworking. Warm and solid.”

I told her more. How the two men had been friends though not particularly close. They played on the same softbal team in Central Park —the Canal Street Cannolis— and had spent their entire lives within six blocks of one another in Little Italy and Soho.

Gray’s grandfather had come from a long line of winemakers. He took the boat over from Sicily just before

Mussolini

conquered

Ethiopia.

He

Americanized Grigio to Gray and became a wine merchant on Mulberry.

My grandfather came from Palermo as soon as it was clear Il Duce was going to rev up the troops for WWI . He was sixteen and had Canetti changed to Cane even before he’d gotten off the boat. His family trained dogs for the shepherds. They’d given my grandfather a wool overcoat to wear on the voyage. It made him smel like a wet dog so his fel ow voyagers cal ed him cane—Italian for dog — as a joke.

They spel ed it that way on his papers. He worked his way up from busboy to waiter to manager at La Tasca’s, which he bought in 1960 when al the big New York mafia crews were swinging their weight through town, thanks to Sinatra and Kennedy.

Our fathers grew to manhood in those shadows, as we grew to manhood in their own. “His mother? Did she abuse him?”

“No.”

“Who then? Neighborhood children?”

“No.”

“You?”

“No. Himself. The world. Al of us, none of us. You’re asking the wrong questions.”

The crease between her brows deepened and she clutched the stack of books tighter to her. It was an oddly sexual gesture, or so I thought. “You’re not being very helpful.”

“You can’t track true madness.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I know you don’t. It real y doesn’t matter. You’re never going to heal him, don’t you understand that?

You can’t heal anyone. They either work their way through the fire themselves or they don’t.”

“Tel me about yourself.”

“No.”

Now, acting stunned, as if I was somehow betraying a newly formed friendship or cheating on a girlfriend.

“Excuse me?”

“Doctor, I’m under no obligation to answer your questions, and I’m not interested in continuing this, ah, interview.”

“Not even to help your friend?”

“Help him do what?”

She quickly started shoving books into her handbag. I could see the eagerness in her again, the desire to say something even though she was trying desperately to hold back. I decided psychiatrists were very screwy people with a lot of their own repressions.

I al owed myself the compliment of thinking perhaps she wanted me. Her breasts jiggled slightly and I suddenly felt horny, but not for her. And not for Emily.

Maybe for Nola. What would Trudy think about that?

As a doctor and a woman?

I had a feeling I knew what she was about to say, and I couldn’t keep from smiling.

“What happened out on the Isle of Dogs, Eddie?”

“To me or to him?”

“Both of you.”

“Ask Gray.”

“I did. He told me to ask you.”

Her cel phone rang and she had to dig past my novels to find it in her handbag. She answered it and spoke in a clipped, terse, mostly monosyl abic outburst. “Yes. Oh. No, it must be a mistake. I don’t accept that. No. I see. Yes, I understand.”

She looked at me and her firm voice was fil ed with an aching. “It seems that Mr. Gray has left the Clinic without permission.”

Any other mental institution and they would’ve cal ed that an escape. “He’l be coming here.”

“Something else.” She began to tremble, and I final y saw more real emotion in her, that exterior cracking and al owing me a glimpse of something inside that began to make my bel y burn. “He supposedly did something.”

“What? What did the bastard do now?”

She couldn’t hold onto the handbag anymore. It spun and my books dropped and buffeted her feet. It was a powerful symbol that made me feel very confident of my place in the black universe.

“He’s suspected of...having kil ed another guest.

Strangling her. With his belt.” Her eyes widened and grew more and more distant. Soon tears dribbled down her face though her expression hadn’t changed.

A pleasant flood of noise fil ed my head as Trudy stepped to me, wanting to be held, but I didn’t take her in my arms. “He was the last one seen with her.

They only just found her body, but she’s been dead for hours. Cheyenne Califa. But why? My God, why?”

The storm outside wanted in.

10

CLARITY OF DEFINITION,

WIPERS ON HIGH

BUT SMEARING

I left her standing in my apartment and rushed down the two flights of stairs, careening and slamming into the wal at each turn. Gray already had at least three hours to hitchhike or steal a car and get back into the city. He was either already here or had decided to go straight out to Long Island, twining his way along the parkways to the Isle of Dogs. To wait for me.

Sometimes your fate is directionless and without form, and sometimes you can see the threads of your life drawing together and pointing to one very specific time and place and goal. Gray and I had, for no reason I could see, been on a col ision course since we were born. The way before me was clear.

I had to get back out to the state park, to the mud and surf where we used to camp as boys and where we wrote our very first story together, which I had stolen because my mother had been a secretary.

How could he not hate me?

I sprinted through the rain to my parking garage three blocks away. I kept swal owing water and didn’t know why until I realized I was sneering the entire time, with the rain washing against my teeth.

So he’d done it.

Gray had murdered a woman. Again.

Again.

“— who is set over mankind and over chaos and over spirits, queen of paradise, ruler over serpents and cherubim.”

So now I was tel ing myself the story of the Isle of Dogs, where two boys with imaginations too powerful for the constraints of their friendship decided to create an angel from out of the burning summer sand.

Where she stood before them, her wings of bril iant gold, and charged them to keep her secret. But the burden was too great—

I ran inside and took the elevator to the fifth level, found my car and pul ed out with the engine screeching and the tires squealing. I don’t know why I felt such a need to get there as fast I could. Gray would wait for me however long it took.

I had to slow down. I had to be calm. But it wasn’t possible, having prepared for this moment for too long. I stomped the gas pedal and stood on it al the way down the spiraling ramp, and barely managed to hit the brake in time as a figure moved in front of my path.

“Who

is responsible for overseeing the repentance of sinners and the growth of boys into men.”

Trudy stood before my car, wet and breathless, her hair writhing into her eyes. “Wait!”

“Get out of the way!” I screamed. If I tried to veer around her I might clip her hip, but I was this close to giving it a try.

She placed her hands on the hood, as gently as if she was touching a frightened child. “Where are you going, Eddie?”

“You know where. I told you where.”

“You think he’s going out there? To the park?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why? Why there?”

I let out a bitter laugh that wouldn’t stop. Other people scurried to their cars staring in terror, and a bottleneck was forming behind me. Nobody blared a horn though, and no one threw any insults. I grimaced at Trudy and thought about what kind of things she and Gray had discussed in group therapy, and what Cheyenne Califa had overheard or been told.

“I want to go with you,” she said.

I got out of the car and grabbed her by the shoulders. The wil to violence had me in its grips again and for a moment I thought I might lash out from sheer frustration. That laugh grew louder. It seemed to be coming from someone else, somebody I respected and looked up to and believed would save me from any enemy.

“Are you going to hit me, Eddie?”

I pressed her away and backed off a step. “No.”

“Good, I’m glad to see you can stil control yourself.

You’re not going to do anyone any good if you get in an accident in the middle of Broadway. Now, please, col ect yourself.”

She was right, I had to force myself to think clearly.

The police would be onto Gray but they’d be looking in al the wrong places. Staking out his ex-wives’

places, maybe Monty’s office. He’d be out on the beach searching for a twenty-year-old grave where we’d buried most of our friendship and a fair amount of our sanity. Was it already too late for redemption?

You could always hope that an angel, at least, might forgive you.

“Get in,” I said.

She did and I drove down through Central Park, across the east side town, and up the FDR to the Triboro Bridge, averting as much traffic as I could. It would be faster and easier to take the Expressway out to the east end of Long Island, to the wetlands and the spit where our fathers had left us to become men.

Did I hate them for that? On sweaty nights I turned my face to the pil ow and could smel the stink of dog on me, thick as it had been on my grandfather. Cane.

Trudy asked, “What was that first story cal ed?”

“I don’t remember anymore.”

It sounded like a lie even to myself, but it was the truth. I had never sold the story that Gray and I had dreamed up together. The day I smoked my first cigarette at fifteen I used it to light the corner of the pages and flushed the burning paper down the toilet.

“You’re haunted by so much guilt. Why?” she asked.

I liked the way she asked. Without guile or artful deception, a touch of whine in her voice. She sat with perfect posture, upright and knees tight. It was getting me horny again. I wondered how many of my problems would vanish if I just got laid a little more.

“Have you done much evil in your life, Eddie?”

“I know it’s your job to ask questions, but real y, don’t you think you should at least attempt to make them pertinent?”

“I think this may be very pertinent in regard to your extreme sense of culpability and remorse.”

Whenever I used words like ‘culpability’ in my fiction, the editors would circle it in blue pencil and put a slash through it. “Wel , let’s get our definitions clear first then. What do you consider evil? And what do you consider much?”

“Let’s use the general y accepted terms.”

“Accepted by whom?”

“Society at large.”

“You mean the norm. Except there is no norm.

Everybody is just trying to stay out of the bin, except with the Clinic, where they’re doing whatever they can to stay in. Nobody above the age of three has a right not to feel guilty, doctor.” The back of my neck heated until I felt on fire. I drove wel , reflexes sharpened with manic energy, veering through traffic with a greater confidence than ever before. “By the way, where’d you learn to make brownies like that?”

“Can we please stay focused on the issue?”

“Of my evil? No, let’s not. How about Gray’s evil?

He’s the one who just murdered a woman.”

“I don’t believe that. There must be another explanation.”

I was too stunned to speak for a moment. The naiveté of these people at a state-run psychiatric facility real y shook me up. I made a promise to myself that I’d write a letter to my congressman as soon as I had the final showdown with my homicidal best friend.

The storm grew worse until the Expressway had smal rivers rushing down the exit ramps. I had to turn the windshield wipers up to high. I thought about Gray in some jacked car zipping along ahead of me. I knew he would be just as bolstered by the symbol of storm as I was, as if nature reflected the tempest of our spirits. God watched ringside.

“You’re driving too fast,” she said.

“I’m doing fine.”

“Please, slow down. The roads are terribly wet.”

“You want to get off here?”

But she was right again. I had to regain control.

Gray had loosened something inside me and whatever it was had to be snapped back into place, where it belonged. Soon.

It took over an hour to get to the state park. Gray and I used to enjoy the train ride on the LIRR, those Sunday afternoons after church when we’d travel out this far from the city, alone or with our fathers, the back cars of the train nearly empty, and then we’d walk the mile from the station through the park and its wetlands and out to the Isle of Dogs.

“It might not be safe,” I said.

“He wouldn’t hurt me. He’s my patient.”

“You mean your guest.”

“Please don’t be contrary.”

“Who me?”

Because of the weather the park was empty. I rol ed into the main lot and got up as far as I could to the paths leading back into the woods and down to the inlet. There were no other vehicles in sight, but I could feel Gray skulking in the underbrush somewhere, smirking. I glanced over at Trudy and she was damn near smiling. She could sense him nearby as wel .

“You’ve fal en for him, haven’t you? That’s why you’ve given him al this attention.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You real y think he could ever love you? He doesn’t love anybody. His first two wives kil ed themselves.

Did he tel you that?”

Her nostrils flared and she almost started to pout.

Then she caught herself and stiffened in her seat. So Gray had kept some secrets after al . “Which direction is this isle?”

“Fol ow me.”

We got out and she reached to grab my hand, al owing me to tug her along as we made our way through the overgrown paths heading down to the sawgrass-covered shore. The pelting cold rain hurt but she didn’t make a sound. The woods grew thicker, the way more haphazard, as the ground shifted from pasture to rock and silt. A few hundred yards on it changed to black mud, and then to a near-swamp with eddying salt water and whirlpools that left behind crabs and occasional lobsters bucking across the stones. No wonder our fathers had loved it here so much. It duplicated nearly every aspect of nature, compacted into an area no larger than a couple of city blocks.

The storm remained on top of us but seemed to be easing, abiding but expectant. Lightning bloomed behind the roiling silver clouds, and thunder grumbled like an annoyed old man. I hadn’t thought it through. I hadn’t dressed properly and I started to shiver badly.

Just like when I was a kid, I made for a lousy nature boy. I bled from a dozen scratches and my clothes were ripped. My shoes were soggy with muck.

I turned to see how Trudy was getting along and she was gone.

“Oh shit.”

I cal ed her name and retraced my steps through the brush but didn’t see her.

It didn’t matter much.

I already knew she wasn’t here to see Gray returned to the Clinic, but to save him from me. She loved him. Of course she did. Al women loved him.

I kept moving through the woods, branches clawing at my forehead and clawing my arms. I felt like a kid again, ful of fear and conviction. I kept prowling along, waiting for Gray to step out into the middle of my path, looking strong and impossible to defeat.

We can only do what is given us to do. I bounced into rotting maple tree trunks and kept getting snarled in sticker bushes. The land broke wide in a series of hil ocks, with menacing stands of virgin pine that spread for miles across the other side of the park. I checked for footprints and saw none as I crossed the smal spit of sand and mud and weeds leading to the Isle of Dogs.

This was it.

Final y, we’ve come back to where our covenant was made.

I moved in a fast crawling-crouch, ducking behind whatever bushes and stumps that I could, as the rising inlet waters heaved and rippled. I slowed and slid to my knees.

Now I only had to wait for Gray to find me.

I couldn’t help myself. I started writing.

The tales were always there, imploring me to tel them. To put words to them, gut them out to the end. It had happened when my mother died and I held her hand in the hospital, taking my mind from the sterile, frigid room of her vainly struggling body and bringing myself elsewhere.

So now I was tel ing myself the story of the Isle of Dogs, where two boys with imaginations too powerful for the constraints of their friendship decided to—

Someone stepped out from behind a tree a dozen feet to my left. Our gazes flicked against each other so hard that it actual y brought my chin up. I sucked in air but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or yel or what.

She did a slow walk from the other side of the weeds and kept her eyes so steadily on me that I let out a groan. Jesus Christ.

It was Cheyenne Califa, the one Gray had strangled.

11

THE POOR TREATMENT OF DOGS,

FLINCHING, PATTING OF THE HEAD

Her powerful presence continued to exude that sense of strength. The madwoman from the Clinic who had been murdered by Gray, with his belt.

Just as she did before, she got up close, doing a slow once-over of my face, taking in every angle and plane, staring so deeply into me that I nearly squirmed. As beautiful as she was I had to force myself not to back away. And then, with amazing speed and clarity, the pieces drew into place.

She wore boots and a slicker. Her gold-flecked, dark eyes glittered with urgency. “Eddie, you have to listen to me—”

I took her hand and squeezed it with a might that was part hate and part passion. She’d used me pretty goddamn wel for someone who’d only met me for five minutes during the hootenanny, while I was chowing down on some chicken parm. “Let me guess. You’re actual y Dr. Califa.”

“Yes.”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, lady.”

“I’m sorry to have deceived you, Eddie.”

“Yeah, everybody is. How did you find this place?”

“During one of our later sessions, Gray gave me detailed instructions on how to find this area.”

“You got here before me. How long have you been waiting?”

“Hours.”

“And Trudy was another guest who, ah, left the Clinic without permission?”

“Yes, we’ve only just discovered she was missing.

We tried to phone you, but—”

I started laughing but stopped abruptly before I went too far with it. I had a habit of doing that more and more lately. “Yeah, I took it off the hook. She came to visit me while I was at the motel in Griffinsvil e too.”

“I didn’t realize that. She must have left and returned again before anyone suspected she was gone from the grounds.”

“Amazing, huh?” I growled, the rage coiling through me. “Considering security is so tight.”

“She was voluntarily admitted, Eddie, she can leave anytime she wants.”

My headache grew worse when I tried to track that. I wavered for a second and Cheyenne—Dr. Califa—

moved to me and held me up, just as she’d done at the party. I was feeling used, and not in a good way, but I couldn’t tel by whom or for what objective. I pressed her away from me. “So he didn’t murder anybody.”

“No.”

“But since he was committed and escaped, you’re after him. Did you cal the police? Are they nearby?”

“No.”

“Why the hel not?”

She pul ed her shoulders back and straightened.

She showed a real sense of duty and purpose, pride and responsibility. I could barely restrain myself from kissing her. “I thought it best if I handled this myself.”

“What?”

“I think I can bring him back with a modicum of distress.”

“Oh my Christ, you love him too.”

Of course she did. Al women loved him.

I fel back against a sticker bush, and the more it cut into me the harder I laughed. “You people are crazier than your inmates. And yeah, I cal ed them inmates, not guests.”

“Eddie, I need you to tel me something.”

“Wait. First I want to know...did a girl commit suicide by swal owing cigarette butts?”

“Yes, it was a horrible tragedy.”

“Then Howards lied.”

“Yes. The matter is stil being investigated, and he’s up for a board of review hearing. He wasn’t about to discuss the situation with you. He knew you were a writer, and he may have believed you were a journalist as wel .”

I didn’t know what to believe anymore, which was probably for the best. Treat every lie as if it was true and you don’t need to worry about it.

There are times when your lust and love and the steaming mass of your loneliness and desires boils over and pours through your veins like the fire that ate away your first written story. I grabbed her by the shoulders and drew her to me, seeing the crazy beauty from the party, the prim psychiatrist who loved my best friend. The insane resentment had been there from the beginning and had never left.

I mashed my lips against hers and moaned and felt no resistance or passion. It didn’t stop me. I pul ed open her slicker and flattened my hands against her breasts. She didn’t move away and didn’t encourage.

The rain ran off her hood and poured down the sides of her head while she stared without expression. I pressed my cheek to hers and turned her face aside, and licked at the throbbing pulse of her throat as if I could pul her love from it. It felt as if I might be crying. I murdered a name I did not recognize. She patted my head like I was a dog and I flinched away.

So now I was tel ing myself the story of the Isle of Dogs, where two boys with imaginations too powerful for the constraints of their friendship decided to create an angel from out of the burning summer sand.

Where she stood—

“Why is this place cal ed the—” she started to ask, but I’d had it with questions.

“Why don’t you check with Howards? Or does he lie to you too? I already went through this with him. Or better yet, ask your boyfriend Gray. This is his sort of pil ow talk.”

“Do it again. Tel me.”

“In the summer people would bring their pets out here. The dogs would run out onto the spit during low tide and get stuck when the water came in.”

“Who named it?”

“We did, doctor.”

“What did you do here?”

“We buried something.”

“What did you bury, Eddie?”

“Maybe I buried Eddie.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t be petulant.”

“He’s never going to love you either, you know.”

But none of them would ever believe that. Not his first two wives, who’d committed suicide, or Nola who ruined her flesh for him, or Trudy who left paradise to work his wil on me, or this one who was playing a ghost, with her own unfulfil ed needs.

“Eddie, please—”

Always saying my name, as if I might forget it or my place in the chain. I only existed to aid them in their quest to own Gray’s heart. Every one of them my own adversary in a way I didn’t want to think about.

“We never knew her name,” I said. “We cal ed her Jazrael. The angel of our story. We kil ed and buried her. In a muddy grave off the shore of a nameless inlet.”

She didn’t accept that. “Didn’t you name it after yourself? Cane. Cane. That’s Italian for dog, isn’t it?

Didn’t you name this isle after yourself?”

“Maybe,” I told her. “Sure.”

She repeated, “This is your place. What did you bury? Tel me.”

“Ask him,” I said as Gray stepped forward through the trees. His teeth were bared.

So were mine.

12

THE MOMENT WE’VE ALL BEEN

WAITING FOR, NOT ENOUGH BLOOD,

TOO MUCH SYMBOLISM

Gray’s voice, thick with intent and rage and history, was no different from my own voice. Sometimes I couldn’t tel which one of us was speaking, we were so alike. “We loved her. Jazrael. She found us. She was ours, but we grew envious of each other. Do you know what that’s like?”

Cheyenne Califa’s gorgeous face lit up like a high-powered lamp. She glowed there in the storm. Yes, she knew what it was like. Al that happiness in her features faded in an instant as Trudy slipped up behind Gray and placed an arm around his waist.

He was stil talking. Or maybe it was me. “To hate the person you love most because you want to love somebody else even more? That’s what happened. It drove us insane.”

The other one agreed.

Cheyenne Califa—perhaps psychiatrist, perhaps deranged mental patient—her beautiful features ful of fear and passion and loss now, knowing that Gray could never be entirely hers even if she or someone else healed the shreds of his soul, looked down at the current of mud streaming past her feet.

She real y didn’t understand him at al . She said,

“You stil believe that loving the angel drove you...?”

“Yes, damn it.”

So now I was tel ing myself the story of the Isle of Dogs, where two boys with imaginations too powerful for the constraints of their friendship decided to create an angel from out of the burning summer sand.

Where she stood before them, her wings of bril iant gold, and charged them to keep her secret. But the burden was too great, and eventual y they kil ed and buried her.

But every story needs a twist. These boys were both crazy through no fault of their own or anyone else’s. You cannot put a reason to al your malfunctions. You can’t put a name to al your iniquities and depravity. You love and hate and fear the things you do without sense or logic. You can even murder without a reason. These boys only thought they were kil ing an angel of their own creation, but in reality...let’s

see,

we

must

see,

there

are

considerations that must be made...perhaps she was a teenage girl, slightly older, who flirted and adored their attention.

Perhaps she took one of them off to the other side of the isle and dragged him into manhood, while the other boy waited, sick and hateful, stewing in his own jealousy.

What next? What would interest the reader most?

Those pervie sons of bitches out there waiting to read about the slippery, slimy parts of teen love in detail. Because their own miserable lives had led them down the one-way al eys of bitterness. Every goddamn one of them.

So they want the kid to pick up a rock and rush over there to find his best friend lying between her legs.

Her top off and her pink breasts heaving and misted by sweat and spray from the ocean. And the kid shrieks in his horror and humiliation at not being the chosen one. At not being the one worth loving that afternoon.

Who does he kil ? Does he smash in his best friend’s skul or does he stare down at the girl and wait...thirty seconds...a minute as she thrashes with her eyes closed...another minute until she sees him there and the light of recognition fil s her eyes?

Gray said, “She who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries—”

I answered, “—who is set over mankind and over chaos and over spirits, queen of paradise, ruler over serpents and cherubim.”

“Who is responsible for overseeing the repentance of sinners and the growth of boys into men.”

“She who is the shining light laid over the eyes of children.”

We moved towards each other with our only purpose clearly laid out before us. Cheyenne rushed up and said, “It’s not real. It’s just a delusion you’ve shared over the years. You were boys of intense imagination. You believed in the story you told each other in the night. A story of murder and betrayal. You both need to return to the Clinic with me. You didn’t kil anyone! Neither of you kil ed anyone!”

“How do you know?” I asked.

I attacked. Gray ducked and my fist sailed over his head. He shifted and began to hammer my ribs again, but he slipped in the mud and went to one knee. I swung my wet hair out of my eyes and gave him an uppercut that lifted him onto his feet again. The women screamed and the storm thrummed again, wind tearing at the two of us. I started working his jaw.

Those new teeth real y pissed me off and I wanted to see how much they’d love him when he gave them a black smile.

He roared and the thunder resounded as he rushed me and slammed me backwards into the water. I fought for air even as he slugged me in the shal ows.

Who was dead? Who’d been buried? Maybe Eddie real y had been buried, and was stil twisting in the sand. Right here, right in this very spot.

Hel , who was even sane? Cheyenne tried to pul him off as Trudy shrieked Gray’s name. It sounded like she was urging him on. I wasn’t feeling particularly wel loved. I managed to get my knee between us and kicked out with everything I had. Gray let loose with a sharp cry and fel back a step, long enough for me to clamber out of the water. I rushed forward and tried to head butt him, but I slid and he easily evaded me. He caught one wrist and slammed an elbow into my gut, and for a few seconds I was air bound. I hit the brush hard but rol ed back onto my feet.

A goddamn fistfight. Al of our lives had come down to a brawl we could’ve had when we were fifteen and been done with for good.

Gray lunged again, fists flailing and I danced out of reach, kicking up sand. Trudy cal ed something low and harsh but adoring, and I looked over and saw her staring at me. She real y was nuts. The back of my head was alive with stories and with the sight of Jazrael’s fiery wings tipped down at both of us. Gray dove on top of me and I slammed a fist into his cheek.

We were both laughing and sobbing. He staggered back a step and I moved in again. We wove together in a ful circle and the crack of bone against bone sounded like a gunshot as he caught me with a roundhouse to the jaw.

It nearly put me out. I couldn’t beat him. He would always have what I didn’t have, and you could never defeat the man you wish you were. If you could, you wouldn’t want to be him.

Lurching backwards into the brush I managed to take off my belt in one fluid motion. Gray parted the branches and I got a clear view of his neck. Final y I was ready. I got the belt around his throat, and I pul ed with everything I had. He yelped and tugged me back onto the beach, and we wrestled wildly, shifting our weight to get the greatest leverage. How close I was.

And how wonderful it felt, to see his eyes bulging with terror and awe like that, and his fat uncoiling as he convulsed in the mud. Trudy and Cheyenne both leaped on my back. Some interest at last. One of them touched my face softly. The other had a rock and heaved it down against my skul .

13

MOVING FROM THIS SPHERE

TO ANOTHER, FOREGOING

DEVIL’S FOOD (ON THE LUNA SEA)

The work goes wel .

The novel is moving again and Monty seems to truly dig it. He sounds excited about the chances of a movie deal as wel . Whenever I cal he answers the phone himself. I don’t know what happened to Candi.

Perhaps she’s stil on the couch where I left her or she’s faded from life and melted away.

I have an appointment tomorrow with the Clinic’s dentist, to fix some of the damage Gray caused. I need an upper bridge on my left side. So does he.

He writes on his side of the cottage and I toil on mine. He’s endlessly tapping away at the keyboard until the sound is almost unbearable. I stil can’t compose on a laptop. Not much anyway. I try to keep up with him but there’s simply no way I can.

Sometimes I type out nonsensical words just so it sounds like I’m as productive as he is. Perhaps he’s doing the same thing. We could spend the rest of our lives writing gibberish simply because we can’t admit that one or the other is better. That he deserves more from life. Or I do.

“I didn’t try to commit suicide,” I tel him.

“What?”

“You said I could get a room here if I just tried to kil someone who’d done me wrong. And be so conflicted about it that I make at least one fairly dramatic suicide attempt. I haven’t done that yet.”

“There’s stil plenty of time.”

“Sure.”

“I told you coming here would be good for you.”

“Yeah, you did.”

We go back to our blind typing as the anger begins to build again. He checks me from the corner of his eye and I try to keep from smiling.

I often see Cheyenne Califa in the corridors of the Clinic. I haven’t been in group therapy with her, and I’m stil not certain if she’s a doctor or not. Perhaps Trudy actual y is my psychiatrist, keeping close tabs on us from next door. I don’t suppose it matters which one might be sane, or even if neither of them are.

The papier mâché lobsters with bright blue eyes and broad, smiling faces watch us with great intensity.

Sometimes I write horrific poems about them coming to life and climbing off the wal s to tear at me with their pincers. I real y need to rip those fuckers down, but Gray finds them calming. Of course.

A knock on the door rouses us both. We look up as one.

“Hel o, Trudy.”

“I made some brownies, apple fritters, and devil’s food cake. What would you like?”

He says fritters and I say brownies. She winks at us both and skips out the door, wiggling her shapely bottom. Lately I get the feeling she’s taken a shine to me.

There is the fluttery laughter of the graduate students playing vol eybal out in the pool.

Stil , I have friends here. I am loved, or at least pretended to be loved, which is fine with me. I play in the clear water with girls in bikinis, and I do my best to ignore the half-smoked cigarettes and butts littering the grounds.

There’s another dance coming up next weekend, and I’m thinking about inviting Nola to spend some time with me.

I am hopeful. I am nothing if not hopeful.

I turn and see Gray sneering at me. I reach down and check my waist and feel the empty belt loops.

That’s al right. My belt must be around here someplace.